Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Cakes, Nuts, and Gingerbread
Ingredients
Directions
Mix the flour thoroughly until it forms a lump of dough.
Flour your work surface and lay the dough on it.
Knead the dough well, then divide it into eight or ten pieces and knead each piece separately.
Combine all pieces and knead them together into one lump.
Cut the dough in half and roll it out into sheets about ½ inch thick.
Beat the sheets of dough on both sides with a rolling pin.
Cut out round cakes using the edge of a tumbler.
Butter iron pans and place the cakes in them.
Bake until they are a very pale brown, ensuring the top of the oven is hotter than the bottom.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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