Name: Spare Rib
Ingredients: spare-rib; 1 tablespoon butter; 1 tablespoon flour; 1 teaspoon dried sage; apple sauce; potatoes

Why it works: Sage and apple work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Spare Rib

Ingredients

Directions

Baste the spare-rib with butter and flour.
Sprinkle crumbled dried sage over the rib.
Serve with apple sauce and potatoes, as you would for roasted pork.

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.

Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Sage + potatotop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together386 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sagetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,115 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,456 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sage, sauce, potato):

Lemonfits better
Raisinfits better
Limefits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sage, sauce, potato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.