Name: Cabinet Pudding
Ingredients: Stale sponge cake or Savoy biscuits; ½ pint of milk; 4 egg yolks; 2 egg whites; 6 or 8 ratafia biscuits; 1 tablespoon of castor sugar; a few drops of vanilla; a few cherries; a little angelica

Why it works: Biscuit and angelica share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 69 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Butter a mold with straight sides.
Ornament the bottom with strips of angelica and halved cherries.
Line the sides with narrow strips of sponge cake or Savoy biscuits.
Break the trimmings of the cake or 3 to 4 biscuits into small pieces and place them in the mold with the ratafias.
Beat the egg yolks and whites, then add the sugar, vanilla, and milk.
Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then pour the mixture into the mold.

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.

Biscuit + angelicatop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together69 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,187 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).
Vanilla + angelicatop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together170 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together35,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Biscuit + vanillatop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together422 recipes

Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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 angelica

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

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegfits better
Angelicathe original
Capersfits less well

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