Name: Brighton Pudding
Ingredients: 3 tablespoons potato flour; 1 pint boiling milk; 6 eggs; grated rind of ½ lemon; a few dried cherries; a few raisins; 2 oz. sugar

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brighton Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

Butter a pudding mold and decorate it with cherries and raisins.

Make the batter

Mix the potato flour with a small amount of milk.
Pour the boiling milk and lemon rind over the flour, mixing well.
Add the beaten eggs and mix until combined.

Steam and serve

Pour the mixture into the mold, cover with buttered paper, and steam for 1½ hours.
Serve with jam 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.

Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,611 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).
Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Set the pudding and give it a light, custardy structure as they cook.
Potato flour: Thickens the milk mixture so the pudding holds its shape when steamed.
Milk: Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, lemon, raisin, sugar):

Arrowrootfits better
Sweet potatofits better
Shallotfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, lemon, raisin, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.