Name: Dinner
Ingredients: Small turbot or brill; shrimp sauce; Roast leg of mutton (8 lbs.); currant jelly; broccoli; mashed potatoes; Junior United pudding; Cheese

Why it works: Turbot and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 248 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the small turbot or brill and serve with shrimp sauce.
Roast the leg of mutton until cooked through.
Serve with currant jelly, broccoli, and mashed potatoes.
Finish the meal with Junior United pudding and cheese.

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.

Turbot + saucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together248 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Broccoli + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together910 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Shrimp + potatotop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together520 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Potato + cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together959 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).
Shrimp + cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together257 recipes

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

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

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turbot, shrimp, sauce, mutton, broccoli, potato, cheese):

Limefits better
Coconutfits better
Lemonfits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turbot, shrimp, sauce, mutton, broccoli, potato, cheese. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.