Name: Milk Diet
Ingredients: ½ pint milk; 2 ounces bread; butter; ⅓ pint milk; ½ pint beef tea; rice or other milk pudding

Why it works: Tea and rice work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Milk Diet

Ingredients

Directions

For breakfast, serve ½ pint of milk with 2 ounces of bread and butter.
For dinner, offer rice or other milk pudding with ⅓ pint of milk or ½ pint of beef tea.
For tea, provide ½ pint of milk with 2 ounces of bread and butter.
For supper, serve ½ pint of milk with 2 ounces of bread and butter.

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.

Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together197 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,374 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Beef + ricetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,265 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk: Provides liquid, moisture and sweetness as the main part of each meal.
Bread: Adds bulk and starch to make the meals more filling.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the bread.
Beef tea: Adds savoury liquid as an alternative to milk at dinner.
Rice pudding: Provides a soft, starchy and sweet dish for dinner.

“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.