Name: English Apple Pudding
Ingredients: 6 tart apples, quartered; ½ cup finely chopped beef suet; ¼ teaspoon salt; cold water; sugar, to taste; sweet liquid pudding sauce, spiced with lemon and ginger

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

English Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make and fill

Make a paste with 1 pint of flour, ¼ pound of beef suet, salt, and enough cold water to form a dough.
Line a pudding bowl with the paste.
Fill the bowl with the quartered apples and sprinkle sugar on top.

Boil and serve

Cover with more paste and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Turn out the pudding and serve with a sweet sauce spiced with lemon and ginger.

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.

Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Apple + gingertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,424 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,147 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,551 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Beef + gingertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,410 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Soften as they cook, giving a moist, tart filling that the sugar sweetens.
Beef suet: Adds fat that keeps the paste rich and tender as it cooks.
Flour (in the method): Forms the structure of the paste that holds the pudding together.