Name: Braised Partridges
Ingredients: 1 small carrot; 1 onion; 1 small head of celery; 4 sprigs of parsley (chopped); 1 oz. of butter; Some fat bacon; ½ pint of good stock; 1 round of bread thickly spread with butter; ⅓ cup of marsala

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braised Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Truss the partridges as you would a fowl for boiling.
Slice the carrot, onion, and celery; put them with the parsley into a stewpan.
Add the butter and lay the partridge (breast side up) on top.
Cover with slices of fat bacon and add the stock.
Simmer very slowly for two hours.
Brown the buttered bread in the oven, adding more butter if needed.
Place the partridges on the bread.
Rub the gravy and vegetables through a fine sieve, add the marsala, boil briefly, and pour over the birds.
Serve immediately.

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.

Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, parsley, butter, bread, spread):

Parsnipfits better
Turnipfits better
Potatofits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, parsley, butter, bread, spread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.