Name: Pudding
Ingredients: milk; bread crumbs; flour; blanched sweet almonds; citron; rose water (optional); grated orange (optional); lemon rinds (optional)

Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

If the milk is not thick enough, add more bread crumbs.
Dip a pudding cloth into boiling water, shake it, and sprinkle flour inside.
Lay the cloth in a deep pan and pour the mixture into it.
Tie the cloth, allowing the pudding to swell, and boil for six hours.
Carefully turn out the pudding and decorate with blanched almonds and sliced citron.
Serve with a hot or cold sauce.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,655 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Rose + orangetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together876 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, flour, almond, rose, lemon):

Raisinfits about as well
Vanillafits about as well
Figfits about as well
Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, flour, almond, rose, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.