Name: Flummery
Ingredients: 2 cups flummery; ½ cup French brandy; 2 pennies worth of cochineal; a little saffron; spinach; ½ pint calf's foot jelly

Why it works: Saffron and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 149 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Let the flummery stand for five to six hours.
If stiff, turn it out without warming.
Bruise cochineal with a knife and mix with brandy; let it sit for 15 minutes and filter through a fine cloth.
For yellow, tie saffron in a cloth and dissolve in cold water.
For green, boil spinach, remove froth, and add to flummery.
To make a fish pond, fill large fish molds with flummery and six small ones.
In a china bowl, add ½ pint of stiff clear calf's foot jelly and let it cool.
Place two small fish on the jelly, then add ½ pint more jelly and let it cool.
Lay four small fish across each other, then fill the bowl with jelly.

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.

Saffron + spinachtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together149 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Brandy + saffrontop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together75 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Brandy + spinachtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together43 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).