Name: Common Plum Cake
Ingredients: 5 cups butter; 10 cups flour; 5 cups sugar; 6 cups stoned raisins; 1 teaspoon cinnamon; 1 teaspoon mace; ½ cup good fresh yeast; 1 pint warm milk

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Common Plum Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the butter, flour, and sugar together in a large bowl.
Add the stoned raisins, cinnamon, and mace, and mix well.
Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk and add to the mixture.
Knead the dough until smooth and let it stand until it rises.

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.

Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,390 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,611 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 (butter, flour, sugar, raisin, cinnamon, milk):

Nutmegfits better
Cardamomfits better
Clovefits better
Macethe original

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