Why it works: Meat and plum work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓
A Christmas Dinner
Ingredients
Directions
Make the mince-meat for pies months in advance and store it in a stone jar with a tight-fitting lid.
Prepare the plum pudding at least a week before serving and boil it.
Make the mince pies the day before serving.
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.
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Meat + plumtop 30% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together64 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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