Name: A Welch Dish
Ingredients: ½ pound of good cheese; ½ cup of milk; ½ teaspoon of mustard; ½ teaspoon of salt; 1 pinch of cayenne; 1 tablespoon of butter; 5 slices of toast

Why it works: Milk and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 81,222 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

The recipe

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Also mentioned in the method: egg, bread

Directions

Grate the cheese and add it to the milk in a kettle.
Mix the mustard, cayenne, and eggs together and beat well.
When the cheese melts, add it to the mixture along with the butter.
Cook for no more than three minutes.
Toast the bread and pour the cheese mixture over it.
Serve while hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together81,222 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Cheese + buttertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together7,955 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cheese + milktop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together4,424 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cheese + mustardtop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,805 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together7,977 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, milk, butter):

Potatobetter flavor fit
Tomatobetter flavor fit
Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, milk, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).