Name: Oatmeal Pudding
Ingredients: 1½ cups cold-boiled oatmeal; 1 cup sliced apples or ½ cup seedless raisins; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; Sugar and milk or butter for serving

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

1½ cups cold-boiled oatmeal
1 cup sliced apples or ½ cup seedless raisins
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
Sugar and milk or butter for serving

Directions

Prepare

Combine the oatmeal, apples or raisins, and salt in a cooking pot.

Cook and serve

Cook for five hours in an Aladdin Pail.
Serve with sugar and milk or butter.

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.

Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Cold-boiled oatmeal: Forms the thick, soft body of the pudding as its starches absorb liquid and swell during slow cooking.
Apples or raisins: Add moisture and natural sweetness, and their fruit flavour comes through as they soften during cooking.

“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.