Name: Olive Omelet
Ingredients: ½ can mushrooms; ¼ cup olives (plain or stuffed); ½ cup strictly sweet cream; Coarse sea salt (to taste); Parsley (for garnish)

Why it works: Olive and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,649 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Olive Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the olives and mushrooms.
Beat in enough cream to make a paste and season with salt.
Make a plain omelet.
Just before serving, fold the olive and mushroom paste into the omelet.
Serve garnished with stoned olives and 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.

Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mushroom + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,571 recipes

Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + parsleytop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,132 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,500 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Olive + creamtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,206 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).