Name: Cream Tea
Ingredients: 4 teaspoons boiling water; 1 teaspoon sweet cream; 1 teaspoon loaf sugar

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Tea

Ingredients

4 teaspoons boiling water
1 teaspoon sweet cream
1 teaspoon loaf sugar

Directions

Combine boiling water and sweet cream in a cup.
Stir in loaf sugar until dissolved.
Serve warm.

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 + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet cream: Adds fat and richness, softening the tea's flavour.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the drink and dissolves into the warm liquid.
Boiling water: Forms the warm liquid base that the cream and sugar are mixed into.

“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.