Name: Rhubarb Trifle
Ingredients: 5 or 6 sponge cakes; 1 lb sugar; 8 small sticks of rhubarb; 1 teacupful (about 1 cup) of water; thin custard; colored jelly for garnish

Why it works: Sugar and rhubarb are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rhubarb

Stew the rhubarb in the water until soft.
Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.
Strain off the syrup and let the rhubarb cool.

Assemble and serve

Break the sponge cakes into a dish.
Cover the cakes with the cooled rhubarb.
Top with thin custard and garnish with colored jelly.

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.

Sugar + rhubarbtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,852 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb: Provides the tart fruit flavor and the main moist layer over the cake.
Sugar: Sweetens the rhubarb and, dissolved in the water, forms the syrup.
Sponge cakes: Form the soft base layer that soaks up the rhubarb syrup.
Thin custard: Adds creamy richness and a smooth top layer over the fruit.

“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.