Name: Giblet Soup
Ingredients: chicken giblets; ½ cup minced parsley; 1 small carrot; 1 teaspoon onion juice; 2 tablespoons rice; ¼ teaspoon celery salt; salt; pepper

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,053 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Giblet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

If the giblets include the feet, pour boiling water over them, let stand for a moment, then peel off the skin.
Cut open the heart and remove any clots of blood.
Pull off and discard the tough skin from the gizzard, then shave off all the lean meat, discarding the inner sack.
Trim off the gall bag and any discolored parts from the liver.
Put all reserved portions and the neck, if available, into a saucepan.
Add 3 cups of water and bring to a boil.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together8,053 recipes

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

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together10,173 recipes

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

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together16,012 recipes

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

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

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, parsley, carrot, rice, celery, pepper):

Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Parsnipbetter flavor fit
Potatobetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, parsley, carrot, rice, celery, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).