Name: Fruit Rolls
Ingredients: baking powder biscuit dough; chopped raisins; chopped nuts; sugar

Why it works: Biscuit and nuts share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 38 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Rolls

Ingredients

baking powder biscuit dough
chopped raisins
chopped nuts
sugar

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare baking powder biscuit dough.
Roll the dough thin.
Spread the dough with a mixture of chopped raisins and nuts.
Sprinkle sugar over the filling.
Roll the dough like a jelly roll.
Cut into rounds.
Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°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.

Biscuit + nutstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together38 recipes

Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).
Biscuit + raisintop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together490 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Biscuit + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,874 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).