Name: Liver Sauce
Ingredients: 1 fowl liver; 2 ounces butter; 1 tablespoon cream; flour (for dusting); pepper (to taste); coarse sea salt (to taste); grated lemon peel (to taste); nutmeg (to taste)

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Liver Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

Wash the fowl liver thoroughly and boil it in a little water for 4 minutes.
Bruise the liver and rub it through a sieve, adding some of the boiling water.

Make the sauce

Dust the butter with flour and melt it in a pan, shaking it gently.
Once hot, add the liver mixture, along with pepper, salt, grated lemon peel, and nutmeg.
Heat thoroughly and serve around the fowl.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl liver: Forms the body of the sauce, giving it a smooth, rich texture when sieved.
Butter: Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the liver and spices.
Flour: Dusted onto the butter to help thicken the sauce as it melts and heats.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.