Name: A Finer Oyster Forcemeat
Ingredients: ½ ounce fresh butter; 4 ounces fine bread-crumbs; 1½ ounces good butter; 1 saltspoon coarse sea salt; ⅓ teaspoon cayenne pepper; ⅓ teaspoon ground mace; ⅓ teaspoon ground nutmeg; 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind; 1 or 2 egg yolks

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 ↓

A Finer Oyster Forcemeat

Ingredients

Directions

Pound the forcemeat to a smooth paste, adding fresh butter if too dry.
Poach or fry the forcemeat in balls for soups or to fill boned fowls or boiled turkeys.
For mushroom forcemeat, cut stems off small mushrooms, peel, and remove the fur.
Melt 1½ ounces of butter in a saucepan, add mushrooms, cayenne, and mace, and stew for 5 to 7 minutes, shaking well.
Transfer mushrooms to a dish to drain liquid and cool.
Mince the cooled mushrooms and mix with bread-crumbs, remaining butter, and egg yolks.
Add salt, cayenne, mace, nutmeg, and lemon rind, mixing thoroughly.
Use the forcemeat poached in small balls for soup or fried with roast fowls.

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).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, egg):

Parsleyfits better
Marjoramfits better
Cinnamonfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.