Name: Honey-cake
Ingredients: 1 ½ pounds all-purpose flour; ¾ pound honey; ½ pound powdered sugar; ¼ pound citron, finely chopped; ½ ounce orange peel, finely chopped; ¾ ounce ground ginger; ¾ ounce ground cinnamon

Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Honey-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the sugar with the honey in a saucepan.
Mix in the flour, citron, orange peel, ginger, and cinnamon until combined.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface.
Cut the dough into small cakes in your desired shape.

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.

Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,380 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,437 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,833 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,446 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, honey, sugar, ginger, cinnamon):

Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Orangethe original

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