Name: Miss E. L. Piper's Drop Cakes
Ingredients: 2 cups flour; 1 teaspoon baking soda; ½ cup raisins, seeded and chopped; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Miss E. L. Piper's Drop Cakes

Ingredients

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup raisins, seeded and chopped
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Dissolve the baking soda in hot water.
Combine flour, dissolved baking soda, chopped raisins, and salt in a bowl.
Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a baking sheet.

Bake

Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour: Provides the structure that holds the drop cakes together as they bake.
Baking soda: Reacts with the mixture to lift it and help the cakes rise and brown.
Raisins: Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the cakes.

“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.