Name: Lobster Rissoles
Ingredients: meat of a small lobster; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; juice of ¼ small lemon; ⅓ teaspoon anchovy essence; 1 cup milk; 1 cup cream; 2 large eggs or 3 small eggs

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 ↓

Lobster Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse a slice of onion in 1 tablespoon of milk near the fire.
Remove the onion and add milk to make ½ cup with cream.
Beat the yolks of the eggs and stir into the cream, heating to boiling point.
Cut the lobster meat and mix with lemon juice and seasonings, then heat.
Combine the heated lobster mixture with the cream and eggs off the fire and let cool before shaping into rissoles.

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).
Lobster + anchovytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together470 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Lobster + creamtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Anchovy + eggtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,330 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together335 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).