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Bread

Cinnamon Roll

A sweet roll made with butter, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg, and yeast, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cinnamon Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix yeast, nutmeg, flour, and a pinch of salt.

  2. Add enough flour to make a soft dough and let it rise until doubled in size.

Fill and shape

  1. Work down the dough and roll it out to ½ inch thick.

  2. Spread butter over the dough, then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, and cover with raisins.

  3. Roll up the dough and let it rise again until doubled in size.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

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.

  1. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and traps rising gas.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the filling rich and the rolls tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling and surface brown in the oven.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture to the spiral filling.

The step that matters

Second rise after rolling. The dough must be fully doubled before baking. Under-proofed rolls stay dense, while over-proofed dough loses its gas structure and can collapse or bake with a coarse crumb.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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