Name: Fruit Bread with Molasses
Ingredients: 10 pounds roll dough; 1 pint New Orleans molasses; 1½ pounds currants or raisins

Why it works: Molasses and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,817 recipes. The science ↓

Fruit Bread with Molasses

Ingredients

10 pounds roll dough
1 pint New Orleans molasses
1½ pounds currants or raisins

Directions

Prepare 10 pounds of roll dough.
Mix in 1 pint of New Orleans molasses.
Fold in 1½ pounds of currants or raisins.
Shape the dough and let it rise before baking.

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.

Molasses + curranttop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,817 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Roll dough: Provides the structure and chewy crumb that holds the fruit and molasses.
New orleans molasses: Adds sweetness, depth of flavor, and moisture, and darkens the crumb.
Currants or raisins: Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the bread.

“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.