Name: Partridges Grilles with Mushrooms
Ingredients: 3 or 4 partridges; mushroom sauce; parsley; lemon-thyme; chopped truffles

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Partridges Grilles with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the partridges by splitting them down the middle.
Broil the partridges as you would for chickens.
Make a mushroom sauce and add parsley, lemon-thyme, and chopped truffles.
Pour the hot sauce over the partridges just before serving.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,973 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,900 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,557 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).