Name: Apple Butter Roll
Ingredients: dough for biscuits; apple butter; string; cloth

Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Butter Roll

Ingredients

dough for biscuits
apple butter
string
cloth

Directions

Prepare biscuit dough, but make it slightly shorter.
Roll the dough to about ½ inch thick.
Spread apple butter evenly over the dough.
Roll the dough up like a jelly roll.
Wrap the roll in a cloth and tie each end with string, leaving room for it to rise.
Boil the wrapped roll for 1 to 1¼ hours.
Serve warm with sweet cream.

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.

Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,706 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,009 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Biscuit + appletop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together260 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).