Name: Egg Custard
Ingredients: 1 quart milk; 1 tablespoon flour; 1 ounce butter; 6 ounces sugar; 6 eggs; rose-water or grated orange peel to taste; nutmeg or cinnamon for topping

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Egg Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Heat the milk in a saucepan until it begins to boil.
Mix the flour with a little cold milk until it has a cream-like consistency, then stir it into the boiling milk.
Boil the mixture for a few more minutes, then remove it from the heat and stir in the butter and sugar.
Whisk the eggs until light and fluffy, then stir them into the cooled milk mixture along with the rose-water or orange peel.
Line your baking plates with pastry and fill them with the custard mixture.
Grate a little nutmeg or cinnamon on top before placing them in the oven.

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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Rose + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,067 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg, rose):

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegthe original
Allspicefits less well
Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.