Name: A Southern Recipe
Ingredients: sweet potatoes (yams preferred); butter; sugar; nutmeg; orange peel; orange juice

Why it works: Sweet potato and yam share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 99 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Parboil the sweet potatoes and cut them into slices.
Cover the bottom of a pudding dish with the slices.
Add a little butter, sugar, and nutmeg.
Strew a few bits of orange peel over the mixture.
Add a little orange juice.
Fill the dish and bake for about 30 minutes.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Sweet potato + yamtop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together99 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sweet potato + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together414 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Nutmeg + orangetop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together2,746 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Sweet potato + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together191 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Yam + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together29 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, yam, butter, sugar, nutmeg):

Coconutbetter flavor fit
Pumpkinbetter flavor fit
Vanillabetter flavor fit
Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, yam, butter, sugar, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).