Name: A Soujie
Ingredients: ½ pint cream; ½ pint new milk; 4 ounces rice flour or potato flour; 2 to 3 ounces fresh butter; sugar to taste; grated lemon peel; 6 to 8 egg yolks

Why it works: Milk and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 81,222 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

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

Directions

Warm the cream and milk together in a clean saucepan.
Make a smooth batter with the rice flour or potato flour and stir it into the milk.
Simmer while stirring until it thickens.
Add the fresh butter, sugar to taste, and a little grated lemon peel.
Remove from heat and quickly stir in the well-beaten egg yolks.
Butter a pan and pour the mixture into 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together81,222 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Milk + ricetop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together7,354 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Cream + buttertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together41,494 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cream + sugartop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together43,437 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Rice + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together4,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

Vanillabetter flavor fit
Coconutbetter flavor fit
Strawberrybetter flavor fit
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, rice, butter, sugar, egg. 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).