Name: To Bake a Sucking Pig
Ingredients: 1 sucking pig; flour; butter; veal gravy; butter rolled in flour; brains from the pig; sage from the pig's belly; apple sauce; mustard

Why it works: Sage and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Bake a Sucking Pig

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Place the pig in a dish and coat it with flour.
Rub butter all over the pig and place it in the oven.
When it appears cooked, remove it and rub it with a buttered cloth.
Return it to the oven until dry.
Remove the pig, cut it up, and skim off the fat from the baking dish.
Combine the remaining gravy with veal gravy and butter rolled in flour, then boil with the brains.
Pour the mixture into a dish and mix with the sage from the pig's belly.
Serve hot with apple sauce and mustard.

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.

Sage + mustardtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,066 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sagetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,115 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, veal, sage, sauce, mustard):

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, veal, sage, sauce, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.