Name: West Riding Pudding
Ingredients: butter for greasing; chestnuts; milk; sugar to taste; vanilla extract; heavy cream

Why it works: Chestnut and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 244 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

West Riding Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Grease a border mold with butter and cover it with buttered paper.
Steam the mold for 2 to 2.5 hours.
Shell, scald, and skin the chestnuts.
Cook the chestnuts in a small amount of milk until tender.
Rub the cooked chestnuts through a fine sieve.
Sweeten the chestnut puree to taste and add a few drops of vanilla and the cream.
Invert the mold onto a hot dish, pile the chestnut puree in the center, and pour sauce around it.

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.

Chestnut + vanillatop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together244 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,187 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together35,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, milk, sugar, vanilla, cream):

Almondfits better
Cocoafits about as well
Chestnutthe original
Hazelnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, sugar, vanilla, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.