Name: Prune Jelly
Ingredients: 2 slices of lime; a little cinnamon; 1 cup claret; 1 cup water; 1 ounce gelatine; 1 liqueur glass cherry brandy; 1 glass good red wine; blanched almonds for decoration; whipped cream for serving

Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Prune Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Combine lime slices, cinnamon, claret, and water in a saucepan to cover the fruit.
Stew gently until the fruit is tender.
Drain the liquid and stone the prunes.
Pass the fruit through a sieve and save the pulp in a basin.
Crack the stones and add the kernels to the pulp.
Dissolve gelatine in the strained liquor over heat.
Mix the dissolved gelatine with the prune pulp, then add cherry brandy and red wine.
Decorate a plain border mold with blanched almonds.
Fill the mold with the prune mixture and set on ice to form.
When ready, turn out the jelly and fill the center with whipped cream.

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.

Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,514 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lime + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together470 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Lime + almondtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together258 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,130 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Cherry brandy + red winetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cinnamon, cherry brandy, red wine, almond, cream):

Vanillafits better
Cherryfits better
Plumfits better
Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, cherry brandy, red wine, almond, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.