Name: Venison Boiled
Ingredients: shoulder, neck, or breast of venison; coarse sea salt; various vegetables (turnips, cauliflower, spinach, carrots, beet-root); cream; butter; melted butter; horseradish sauce or garlic sauce

Why it works: Turnip and horseradish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Venison Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the venison for a week or ten days.
Boil the venison according to the usual rules for boiled meat.
Prepare vegetables: mash turnips with cream and butter, separate cauliflower into sprigs, slice carrots and beet-root, and cook spinach.
Serve the venison with the prepared vegetables and sauces.

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.

Turnip + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together48 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together286 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together139 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together320 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, turnip, cauliflower, spinach, cream, butter, horseradish):

Beetrootfits better
Mustardfits better
Broccolifits better
Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, turnip, cauliflower, spinach, cream, butter, horseradish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.