Name: Treacle Pudding
Ingredients: suet pastry; treacle; bread crumbs; ginger; grated lemon rind; thin paste

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Treacle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Line a buttered pudding basin with a thin layer of suet pastry.
Fill the basin with alternate layers of treacle, bread crumbs, ginger, and grated lemon rind.
Add very thin paste between the layers.
Cover with a thick round of paste.
Tie a cloth over the top and boil or steam for 2.5 hours.

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.

Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,445 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Bread + gingertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together565 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).