Name: An Excellent Hotch Potch
Ingredients: peas; lettuce; onions; beef or ham bone; mutton or lamb steaks; coarse sea salt; butter; flour

Why it works: Peas and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,293 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

An Excellent Hotch Potch

Ingredients

Directions

Stew peas, lettuce, and onions in a small amount of water with a beef or ham bone.
Fry mutton or lamb steaks until nicely browned.
Three quarters of an hour before dinner, place the steaks in a stew pan and add the vegetables on top.
Stew everything together and serve in a tureen.

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.

Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,293 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,092 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,562 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,373 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lettuce + flourtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,236 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, onion, beef, mutton, butter, flour):

Leekfits better
Potatofits better
Shallotfits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, onion, beef, mutton, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.