Name: A Delicious Cake At Minimum Expense
Ingredients: 1 box of cake mix; 1 tablespoon melted butter; milk (enough to make a regular cake dough)

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

A Delicious Cake At Minimum Expense

Ingredients

1 box of cake mix
1 tablespoon melted butter
milk (enough to make a regular cake dough)

Directions

Pour the contents of the box into a dish.
Add 1 tablespoon of melted butter.
Add enough milk to make a regular cake dough.
Mix well and put immediately in the oven.

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.

Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Cake mix: Provides the flour, sugar and leavening that form the cake's structure and sweetness.
Butter: Adds fat for richer flavor and a tender crumb.
Milk: Adds moisture to hydrate the mix and form a batter.

“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.