Name: Roasting Meat
Ingredients: joint of meat; ½ pint melted butter; sliced lemon; boiled bacon or ham or pickled pork or boiled tongue; broccoli or cauliflower or sweet young greens or green peas or French beans; potatoes

Why it works: Broccoli and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 910 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roasting Meat

Ingredients

joint of meat
½ pint melted butter
sliced lemon
boiled bacon or ham or pickled pork or boiled tongue
broccoli or cauliflower or sweet young greens or green peas or French beans
potatoes

Directions

Serve the joint in a hot dish.
Pour over it brown gravy made with melted butter.
Garnish with thin slices of lemon.
Serve with boiled bacon, ham, pickled pork, or boiled tongue.
Accompany with vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, sweet greens, green peas, or French beans and potatoes.
Garnish the dish with sliced lemon and serve with a lemon cut in halves.

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.

Broccoli + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together910 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + broccolitop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together809 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Lemon + potatotop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,456 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, ham, broccoli, potato):

Lemonthe original
Coconutfits about as well
Avocadofits about as well
Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, ham, broccoli, potato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.