Name: Delicate Chicken Pudding
Ingredients: white meat of 1 chicken; 1 piece French bread (size of a walnut); milk (enough to boil the bread); 1 egg; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

Why it works: Walnut and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Delicate Chicken Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Pound the white meat of the chicken in a mortar and pass it through a fine sieve.
Boil the piece of French bread in a little milk until soft.

Make and cook the pudding

Add the egg, salt, and nutmeg to the bread mixture and mix well.
Combine the chicken mixture with the bread mixture.
Place the mixture in a tea cup or small basin and tie it down tightly with a cloth.
Boil for 20 minutes if using a large tea cup.

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.

Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,230 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Meat + chickentop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,449 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,389 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).
Meat + walnuttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,035 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

White meat of chicken: Provides the main protein and body of the pudding once pounded and sieved.
French bread: Soaked in milk, it adds softness and bulk that help bind the pudding.
Egg: Sets during boiling, holding the mixture together into a firm, tender pudding.

“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.