Name: Rhubarb
Ingredients: young rhubarb, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces; ¾ cup sugar; pastry for covering

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb

Ingredients

young rhubarb, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
¾ cup sugar
pastry for covering

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Wash the rhubarb pieces and place them in a dish.
Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the rhubarb.

Cover and bake

Cover the dish with pastry.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the pastry is golden and the rhubarb is tender.
Serve warm.

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.

Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,852 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Young rhubarb: Tart stalks that soften during baking to form the fruit filling.
Sugar: Adds sweetness, balances rhubarb's tartness, and draws out juice as it sits.
Pastry: Forms the covering that bakes to a golden, browned crust over the fruit.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.