Name: Ratafia Pudding
Ingredients: ¼ pound ratafias; 6 sponge cakes; 3 ounces citron; grated rind of 1 lemon; 1 pound castor sugar; ½ pint almond milk; 6 eggs (leave out 3 whites); orange marmalade (for greasing and serving)

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ratafia Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Soak the sponge cakes in ½ pint of almond milk.
Beat in 6 eggs, leaving out 3 egg whites.
Grease and sugar your mold with orange marmalade.

Cook and serve

Pour the mixture into the mold.
Boil in a saucepan for 1 hour.
Serve with a sauce around the pudding.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,125 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,655 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,696 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cakes: Soak up the almond milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Eggs: Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Almond milk: Adds moisture and almond flavour to the soaked cake.
Castor sugar: Adds sweetness and helps tenderise the 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.