Name: To Make a Cream Pudding
Ingredients: 1 quart cream; 1 blade of mace; ½ nutmeg, grated; 8 eggs; 3 egg whites; 1 tablespoon flour; ¼ pound blanched almonds, finely ground; 1 tablespoon orange-flower water or rose-water

Why it works: Nutmeg and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Make a Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the cream with the mace and grated nutmeg, then let it cool.
Beat the eggs and egg whites, then strain them well.
Mix the flour with the eggs, then add the ground almonds and orange-flower or rose-water.
Gradually mix in the cooled cream and beat everything together well.
Wet a thick cloth, flour it well, and pour in the mixture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,115 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,125 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,746 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, nutmeg, egg, flour, almond, orange):

Cinnamonfits better
Cardamomfits better
Allspicefits better
Macethe original

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