Name: Scotch Collops
Ingredients: ½ cup wine; veal sweetbreads; force-meat balls; truffles; morels; ox palates; mushrooms; juice of ½ lemon; rashers of bacon

Why it works: Truffle and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,900 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Gently stew the wine, sweetbreads, force-meat balls, truffles, morels, ox palates, and mushrooms for 30 minutes.
Add the lemon juice and pour over the collops.
Garnish with rashers of bacon.
For Scotch collops, add the collops to the ragout and stew for 5 minutes.

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.

Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,900 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Wine + mushroomtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,632 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).
Veal + truffletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together815 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together527 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,157 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, veal, meat, truffle, mushroom):

Lemonthe original
Grapefits about as well
Red currantfits about as well
Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, veal, meat, truffle, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.