Name: Jersey Black Puddings
Ingredients: 2 dozen large onions; 10 ounces sweet lard; 3 pounds pig's leaf (sweet and dry); coarse sea salt (to taste); black pepper (to taste); herbs (to taste)

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Jersey Black Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Peel the onions and cut off the bottoms.
Chop the onions into small pieces.
Cut the pig's leaf into small dice.

Cook

In a stewpan, combine the onions and sweet lard.
Stew the mixture slowly until the onions are light brown.
Add the diced pig's leaf to the stewpan.
Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and herbs to taste.

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.

Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions: Provide the bulk and sweetness as they slowly brown in the fat.
Sweet lard: Carries the cooking of the onions and adds richness and moisture.
Pig's leaf: Adds fat and body to the mixture, giving a richer texture.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture slowly until the onions are light brown. Slow cooking in fat draws out the onions' natural sugars and softens them evenly. Cooking too fast can scorch the sugars and leave bitter, uneven browning.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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Jersey Black Puddings