Name: Chartreuse of Vegetables
Ingredients: butter; cooked vegetables of two colors (e.g., carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, canots, cabbage stems, lettuce)

Why it works: Turnip and artichoke match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chartreuse of Vegetables

Ingredients

butter
cooked vegetables of two colors (e.g., carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, canots, cabbage stems, lettuce)

Directions

Line a plain mold with buttered paper, ensuring every part is covered with butter.
Cut the cooked vegetables into long strips or square blocks, about 1 inch in size.
Arrange the vegetable pieces in the mold so they fit snugly.
Ensure the vegetables are slightly undercooked to maintain texture.

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 + artichoketop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together140 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together526 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, turnip, artichoke, lettuce):

Beetrootfits better
Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, artichoke, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.