Name: Beef
Ingredients: 1 piece of sirloin beef; butter; flour; horseradish; potatoes; broccoli; French beans; cauliflower; celery

Why it works: Broccoli and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 127 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Preheat your oven to a strong fire.
Butter a piece of writing paper and fasten it to the back of the sirloin with small skewers.
Once the meat is warm, dust it with flour and baste it with butter.
A quarter of an hour before it's done, remove the paper, dust with more flour, and baste with butter again for a good crust.
Garnish the dish with scraped horseradish and serve with potatoes, broccoli, French beans, cauliflower, or celery.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Broccoli + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together127 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Horseradish + broccolitop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together86 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together139 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together290 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Broccoli + beanstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together339 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, flour, horseradish, broccoli, beans, cauliflower):

Mustardfits better
Turnipfits better
Beetrootfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, horseradish, broccoli, beans, cauliflower. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.