Name: Meat and Poultry
Ingredients: 59 Spanish onions, sliced; a little lemon peel; pepper to taste; salt to taste; a little allspice; browning (for color); 1 tablespoon mushroom ketchup; flour (if needed for thickening)

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat and Poultry

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the sliced onions, lemon peel, pepper, salt, and allspice until the steak is done.
Remove the steak and carefully skim the gravy.
Add a little browning and mushroom ketchup to the gravy.
Keep the steak warm on a hot stove or return it to the stewpan to warm up.
If the gravy is not thick enough, stir in a little flour.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,395 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,083 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,626 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, pepper, allspice, mushroom, ketchup, flour):

Shallotfits better
Arrowrootfits better
Capsicumfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, allspice, mushroom, ketchup, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.