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Dessert

Blackberry Roll

A rolled pastry filled with berries, baked and served with a sweet berry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Blackberry Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, butter, and salt.

  3. Add the milk and roll the dough out to ⅓ inch thick.

Fill and bake

  1. Spread the berries over the dough, sprinkle with sugar, and roll it up.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes and serve hot.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the mashed berries and boiling milk, stirring well.

  3. Dissolve the corn starch in a little milk and stir it in slowly.

  4. Let the sauce boil for 3 minutes and serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough's structure once mixed with liquid and rolled.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the dough rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough and sauce.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds moisture to the sauce.
Berries
Provide the filling's fruit flavor, moisture, and color.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.

The step that matters

Let the sauce boil for 3 minutes. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the liquid reaches a boil, and it needs a few minutes of heat to cook out its raw starch taste. Stirring slowly while adding it prevents lumps.

“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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