Name: Frozen Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pint custard; ½ pint cream; preserved citron to taste; preserved ginger to taste

Why it works: Cream and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Frozen Pudding

Ingredients

1 pint custard
½ pint cream
preserved citron to taste
preserved ginger to taste

Directions

Prepare

Combine custard and cream in a bowl.
Add preserved citron and ginger to taste.

Freeze

Pour the mixture into a mold.
Freeze until solid.

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 + gingertop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,137 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Custard: Provides the base richness and creamy body of the frozen dessert.
Cream: Adds fat that keeps the frozen texture smooth and tender rather than icy.
Preserved citron: Contributes a bright, tart flavour that cuts through the richness.
Preserved ginger: Adds warm, spicy aroma and a gentle bite to the custard base.

“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.