Name: Puff Pudding
Ingredients: 2 teaspoons baking powder; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 pint flour; milk (enough to make a soft batter); canned fruit (such as cherries)

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Puff Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

Mix baking powder, salt, and flour in a bowl.
Gradually add milk to create a soft batter.

Assemble and steam

Grease cups and add 1 spoonful of batter to the bottom of each cup.
Add 1 spoonful of canned fruit on top of the batter.
Top with another spoonful of batter.
Steam for 20 minutes and serve with 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 + 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

Flour: Forms the main structure of the pudding as the batter sets.
Baking powder: Releases gas in the batter so the puddings rise and become light.
Milk: Hydrates the flour to form a soft batter and adds moisture.
Canned fruit: Adds sweetness, moisture and flavour within the pudding.

“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.