Name: Fried Crayfish
Ingredients: 1 crayfish; 1 teaspoon anchovy; lemon juice to taste; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; frying fat

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Crayfish

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the white meat from the crayfish and cut it into pieces about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide.
Make a frying batter and season it with anchovy, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.
Dip the crayfish pieces into the batter and plunge them into hot fat.
Fry until golden brown, then drain on kitchen paper for a few minutes.
Pile the fried crayfish on a dish and garnish with fried parsley.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Crayfish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together61 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Crayfish + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together162 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,080 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,232 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).