Name: Cassava Flour Pudding
Ingredients: 1 Cassava cake; ½ cup butter; ¼ cup sugar; 1 teaspoon spice; 5 egg yolks, beaten; 3 egg whites; 2 tablespoons brandy; 1 bitter almond; 1 teaspoon rose water

Why it works: Cassava and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cassava Flour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the Cassava cake in water until soft.
In a bowl, mix the softened Cassava cake with butter, sugar, spice, egg yolks, brandy, and rose water.
Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.
Add the bitter almond and mix gently.

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.

Cassava + almondtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,465 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Brandy + rosetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together560 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,127 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Swap the cassava

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, brandy, almond, rose):

Arrowrootfits better
Sweet potatofits better
Beetrootfits better
Cassavathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, brandy, almond, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.