Name: Apricot Pudding
Ingredients: Slices of thin bread and butter; 3 eggs; Apricot jam; 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 pint milk; 4 drops essence of almonds

Why it works: Apricot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Spread apricot jam on one slice of buttered bread and top with another slice.
Line the inside of a greased basin with the jam-filled bread slices.
Fill the basin with a custard mixture made from beaten eggs, milk, sugar, and essence of almonds.
Serve with a sauce made from apricot jam, sherry, and sugar.

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.

Apricot + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Swap the almond

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

Almondthe original
Pecansfits about as well
Chestnutfits less well
Peasfits less well

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