Name: Meat Pie
Ingredients: 1½ lb Australian mutton or beef; ½ lb kidneys; ¾ lb flour; ¼ lb clarified dripping; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Mutton and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,442 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Open a tin of Australian mutton or beef and carefully remove the fat from the meat.
Open a tin of kidneys and remove the fat, clarifying it by boiling in water.
Cut 1½ lb of meat into small pieces and season with pepper and salt.
Cut ½ lb of kidneys into pieces.
In a bowl, combine ¾ lb of flour with a pinch of salt.
Rub ¼ lb of clarified dripping into the flour until no lumps remain.
Add enough water to form a stiff paste, about ½ cup.
Flour a board and roll out the paste.
Fill a quart pie dish with the meat and kidney mixture.

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.

Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,695 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).