Name: Cream of Cottage-cheese Soup
Ingredients: thin cottage cheese sauce; baking soda; 1 slice onion; 1 small slice lemon rind (yellow part); 1 blade mace or a pinch of nutmeg; croutons

Why it works: Cottage cheese and onion work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 391 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Cream of Cottage-cheese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare a thin cottage cheese sauce, neutralizing the acid with baking soda.
Reheat the sauce with the onion, lemon rind, and mace or nutmeg for delicate seasoning.
Serve the soup with croutons.

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.

Cottage cheese + oniontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together391 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).
Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,078 recipes

Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
Cottage cheese + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together145 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,315 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Sauce + oniontop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,474 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and onion barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 (cottage cheese, sauce, onion, lemon):

Garlicfits better
Parsleyfits better
Dillfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, sauce, onion, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.