Name: Piquante Sauce
Ingredients: yolks of eggs; 2 tablespoons sugar; 2 tablespoons pineapple, diced; whites of eggs, stiffly whisked; butter, for greasing; angelica, for decoration; additional pineapple or sweet sauce, for serving

Why it works: Pineapple and angelica work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and 60 recipes mention both. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the mixture well and let it cool slightly.
Beat in the yolks of the eggs and add the sugar.
Stir in the diced pineapple and then gently fold in the stiffly whisked egg whites.
Prepare a well-buttered souffle mold and decorate the bottom with strips or circles of angelica and pineapple.
Pour the mixture into the mold, cover with buttered paper, and steam gently for 45 to 60 minutes.
Unmold and serve immediately with pineapple or another suitable sweet 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Pineapple + angelicatop 12% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together60 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
Pineapple + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,134 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together4,841 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the angelica

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

Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
Nutmegbetter flavor fit
Gingerbetter flavor fit
Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, pineapple, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).