Name: Duke's Buckwheats
Ingredients: 1 quart buckwheat flour; 1 cup cornmeal; 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon yeast; tepid water (as needed); ½ teaspoon baking soda

Why it works: Buckwheat and flour work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 660 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Duke's Buckwheats

Ingredients

Directions

Sift together the buckwheat flour and cornmeal.
Add the sugar and salt.
Dissolve the yeast in tepid water and mix it with the flour to form a stiff batter.
Let the batter rise overnight in a warm place.
Before cooking, add the baking soda and thin the batter to the desired consistency.

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.

Buckwheat + flourtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together660 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Buckwheat + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together198 recipes

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