Name: Raspberry Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pint flour; 1 quart raspberries; sugar to taste; butter to taste

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raspberry Pudding

Ingredients

1 pint flour
1 quart raspberries
sugar to taste
butter to taste

Directions

Prepare

Mix the flour as you would for cream tartar biscuits, but a little shorter.
Roll out the dough thin (1 inch).
Place the raspberries on the crust and gather up the edges to cover the berries.

Steam and serve

Place in a deep dish and steam for 1 hour.
Turn upside down onto a dish, cut into four quarters, and lift the crust.
Add plenty of sugar and butter, let it stand for a few minutes, and serve.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour: Forms the biscuit-style crust that encloses the berries while they steam.
Raspberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and the juicy filling.
Sugar: Sweetens the berries and their juices.
Butter: Adds richness and fat to the finished 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.