Food Pairing Theory on the Ropes?

Food pairing theory asserts that foods that share flavor molecules go well together. The more flavor molecules they have in common the more we like the pairing—mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and parmesan cheese share 4-methylpentanoic explaining why pizza is so much loved. Prosciutto and parmesan cheese also share a variety of compounds.

Food pairing pairing theory is attractive because it is a reductive explanation—one simple rule can guide the construction of recipes and new flavor combinations can be easily created by identifying ingredients that share flavor molecules. Although handy for creating recipes, I’ve always had some doubts about the theory. It appears to explain some classic pairings well but  I wonder how many exceptions there are, how many popular flavor combinations don’t fit the model. I’ve never seen a systematic study of this question.

But it turns out there is evidence that food pairing theory holds only for North American and Western European cuisines. The cuisines of Southern Europe and East Asia use ingredients that don’t share flavor molecules. And now we have more evidence from a recently published study by Jain et al—Indian food apparently also falls into the anti-pairing camp. From the abstract:

We study food pairing in recipes of Indian cuisine to show that, in contrast to positive food pairing reported in some Western cuisines, Indian cuisine has a strong signature of negative food pairing; more the extent of flavor sharing between any two ingredients, lesser their co-occurrence.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the simple reductionist theory of taste is just not going to explain taste preferences. The anti-pairing hypothesis suggests it is contrast that we seek but surely not any contrast will do. Perhaps there is no underlying system to flavor preferences at all.

But at any rate this research suggests it is Asian and Indian food we should look to in order to fully understand the complexity of flavor.