Name: Italian Style of Dressing Truffles
Ingredients: 10 truffles; ½ cup salad oil; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 1 tablespoon minced parsley; a small amount of finely minced garlic; 2 blades of powdered mace; 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Italian Style of Dressing Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Clean and brush the truffles, then cut them into thin slices.

Bake and serve

Place the truffles in a baking dish and season with oil, pepper, salt, parsley, garlic, and mace.
Bake for nearly an hour.
Just before serving, add the lemon juice and serve very hot.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,308 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles: Form the main body of the dish and provide its distinctive aroma as they heat.
Salad oil: Carries the seasonings and keeps the truffles moist during baking.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich, earthy flavour just before serving.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, pepper, parsley, garlic, lemon):

Thymefits better
Marjoramfits better
Basilfits better
Macethe original

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

“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.