Name: Devonshire Cheesecakes
Ingredients: 1 large carrot; 2 tablespoons flour; ½ pound currants; 1 egg; 1 teaspoon milk; ¼ pound sugar; a little nutmeg; puff pastry

Why it works: Carrot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,424 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Devonshire Cheesecakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil the carrot until tender and rub it through a sieve.
Mix the carrot with flour, currants, beaten egg, milk, sugar, and nutmeg.
Line patty pans with puff pastry.

Bake

Fill the pastry with the mixture and bake until set.

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.

Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,424 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,029 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

What each ingredient does

Carrot: Provides the bulk and moisture of the filling, and its natural sweetness.
Flour: Thickens the mixture so it sets rather than staying wet.
Egg: Binds the filling and helps it set firm when baked.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps browning in the baked filling.
Currants: Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the filling.

The step that matters

Rub the carrot through a sieve. Cooked carrot left in lumps stays grainy and uneven in the filling. Pushing it through a sieve breaks the fibres down into a smooth purée that mixes evenly with the egg and flour and sets with a fine, uniform texture.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, flour, egg, milk, sugar, nutmeg):

Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Currantthe original

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

“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.