Name: Modern Cookery
Ingredients: 2 lemons, juiced; 1 lb sugar (or more to taste); 1 pint port wine; 1 pint sherry; ½ pint brandy; 1 nutmeg, grated; 2 quarts milk; rich cream for serving

Why it works: Port wine and sherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Juice the lemons and set the juice aside.
In a bowl, combine the sugar and grated nutmeg.
Add the port wine, sherry, and brandy to the bowl and mix well.
Milk a cow to collect 2 quarts of fresh milk.
In serving glasses, place a portion of curd, fill with whey, and top with a little rich cream.
Optionally, rasp lemon rind on the sugar for added flavor.

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.

Port wine + sherrytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together132 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,209 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Port wine + brandytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together127 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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 (sugar, port wine, sherry, brandy, nutmeg, milk, cream):

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Applefits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, port wine, sherry, brandy, nutmeg, milk, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.