Name: Black Heart Cherry Pudding
Ingredients: black heart cherries; ½ pound sugar; juice of ½ lemon

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Black Heart Cherry Pudding

Ingredients

black heart cherries
½ pound sugar
juice of ½ lemon

Directions

Fill a pudding basin with black heart cherries.
Add ½ pound of sugar and the juice of ½ lemon.
Boil for the required time until cooked through.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

What each ingredient does

Black heart cherries: Provide the fruit and main flavour, softening into a juicy filling as they cook.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juice to form a syrup.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the cherry flavour and balances the sweetness.

“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.