Name: Hot Cross Buns
Ingredients: 2 quarts milk; 4 ounces yeast; ¾ pound sugar; 1½ pounds butter; 10 eggs; ½ ounce coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); 1 pound currants; lemon flavor; mace

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Hot Cross Buns

Ingredients

Directions

Make a warm, slack sponge with the milk, yeast, and flour.
When the sponge is ready, add the sugar, beaten eggs, salt, and flavor.
Mix in more flour, then add the softened butter and finish mixing.
Fold in the currants and let the dough prove and work over.
Mould the dough into round shapes and place on pans, spaced apart.
Allow to proof for half the time, then stamp or cut a cross on top.
Wash with an egg wash, let it finish proving, and bake at 400°F (200°C).
Ice with a good vanilla water icing after 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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,791 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,475 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, butter, egg, currant, lemon):

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegfits better
Allspicefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, butter, egg, currant, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.