Name: Albert Pudding
Ingredients: 2 eggs; 2 ounces butter; 2 ounces sugar; 2 ounces flour; 2 ounces bread crumbs; 4 ounces sultana raisins; 1 teaspoon strained lemon juice

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Albert Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Separate the yolks and whites of the eggs. Beat the butter until creamy and mix with the yolks.
Add the sugar, flour, bread crumbs, raisins, and lemon juice to the yolk mixture.
Whisk the egg whites until frothy and fold them into the mixture.
Pour the mixture into a buttered mold and serve with wine 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, sugar, flour, bread, raisin):

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Datesfits about as well
Lemonthe original

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