Name: Beetroot and Onion Pudding
Ingredients: 2 large onions, finely chopped; 3 ounces butter; horseradish, grated (to taste); 2 boiled beetroots, chopped finely; salt (to taste); pepper (to taste); mustard (to taste); Yorkshire pudding batter (from recipe No. 820)

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beetroot and Onion Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Fry the chopped onions in butter until light brown.
Remove from heat and add the chopped beetroots, horseradish, salt, pepper, and mustard.
Mix this with the Yorkshire pudding batter.

Bake and serve

Pour into a greased mold and bake as directed in recipe No. 820.
Serve with roast beef.

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.

Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together209 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beetroot + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together484 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,259 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,784 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions: Softened and browned in butter, they add sweetness and savoury depth to the pudding.
Butter: Fat that carries the onion flavour and helps them brown.
Beetroots: Add earthy sweetness and colour to the batter.
Yorkshire pudding batter: Egg and flour batter that sets and rises around the filling as it bakes.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, horseradish, beetroot, pepper, mustard):

Lettucefits better
Shallotfits better
Chivefits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, horseradish, beetroot, pepper, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.