Name: Baked Plum Pudding
Ingredients: 5 buttered crackers; 1 cup sugar; 1 quart boiling milk; 3 eggs, well beaten; ¼ teaspoon salt; spice to taste; raisins to taste; additional butter (optional); additional eggs (optional)

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

In a bowl, pour boiling milk over the buttered crackers and let it stand overnight.
In the morning, break up the crackers.
Add the beaten eggs, salt, spice, and raisins to the mixture.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 2 to 3 hours.

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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,155 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).