Name: Madeira Pudding
Ingredients: 1 cup jam; 2 sheets short paste; water for steaming; cream for sauce

Why it works: Cream and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Madeira Pudding

Ingredients

1 cup jam
2 sheets short paste
water for steaming
cream for sauce

Directions

Assemble

Lay one sheet of short pastry in the bottom of a deep round pan.
Spread a layer of jam on top.
Add another sheet of short pastry, then another layer of jam of a different color.
Repeat until the pan is filled like a jelly cake.

Steam and serve

Steam for 2 to 3 hours.
Serve with cream for sauce.

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.

Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Jam: Provides sweetness and a colored filling layer between the pastry sheets.
Short paste: Forms the tender, rich pastry layers that hold the filling.

“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.