Why Food Matches?

Because he loves the very, very delicate taste of turbot, Jeremiah Tower can’t imagine pairing it with anything more complicated than a hollandaise sauce and some little boiled potatoes. “With the hollandaise, there’s an enrichment of the flavor without adding lots of distracting flavors,” he says. And Tower thinks that pork doesn’t need more than a sprinkling of black pepper: “I believe strongly in the marriages of flavors!”

When we asked leading chefs how they knew that certain flavors or foods would complement each other, the usual response was something along the lines of, “You just know. After tasting so many different foods and food combinations, you store the ones that work in your head. When you’ve accumulated enough, you can even get pretty good at predicting which combinations you haven’t yet tasted will work, based on the ones you know that work.”