Name: Sausages
Ingredients: 1 pound lean pork; ½ pound fat pork; 1 teaspoon salt; ½ teaspoon pepper; ½ teaspoon dried marjoram; ⅓ of a small nutmeg; 1/6 of a lemon rind; 3 sage leaves

Why it works: Marjoram and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 507 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Ensure the pork is fresh.
Mince the lemon rind as finely as possible.
Mix the minced lemon with the other ingredients, having minced or powdered the sage leaves.
Cut the pork into small pieces.
Combine all ingredients in a bowl and pass the mixture through a sausage machine.

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.

Marjoram + sagetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together507 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Marjoram + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together957 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together687 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Lemon + sagetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together887 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Nutmeg + sagetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together642 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, marjoram, lemon, sage):

Thymefits better
Rosemaryfits better
Parsleyfits better
Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, marjoram, lemon, sage. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.