Name: Selle De Mouton a LA Jardiniere En Surprise
Ingredients: 4 eggs; ½ pint milk; 1 ounce green pistachios, blanched and coarsely chopped; chocolate icing; apricot ice; fruits for garnish

Why it works: Milk and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 825 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make a sponge cake with 4 eggs and bake in a long square baking dish.
Shape the cooled cake into a saddle of mutton.
Ice the cake with dark chocolate icing to resemble a roasted mutton.
Fill the interior with apricot ice.
Garnish with a custard colored brown with melted chocolate and mixed fruits.

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.

Milk + apricottop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together825 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pistachio + chocolatetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together209 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Milk + chocolatetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together9,121 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Pistachio + apricottop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together188 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Egg + milktop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together88,465 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 pistachio

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, chocolate, apricot):

Pecansbetter flavor fit
Almondbetter flavor fit
Hazelnutbetter flavor fit
Pistachiothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, chocolate, apricot. 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).