Name: Currant Pudding
Ingredients: 1 baker's loaf, sliced; butter, to taste; 3 pints currants, sweetened

Why it works: Butter and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,856 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currant Pudding

Ingredients

1 baker's loaf, sliced
butter, to taste
3 pints currants, sweetened

Directions

Spread butter on the sliced bread.
Sweeten the currants and mix them with the bread.
Set the mixture aside until cold.
Slice the bread thin and serve without 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.

Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,856 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's loaf: Forms the bulk of the dish, soaking up the butter and currant juices as the pudding sets.
Currants: Add sweetness, tartness and moisture that flavour the bread through and through.
Butter: Coats the bread slices, adding richness and fat that softens the crumb.

“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.