Name: A Cheap Seed Cake
Ingredients: 2 quarts flour; ½ pound sugar; ¼ teaspoon allspice; ¼ teaspoon ginger; ¾ pound butter; ½ pint milk; ¼ pint yeast; seeds or currants; 1 teaspoon lemon essence

Why it works: Allspice and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Cheap Seed Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the flour, sugar, allspice, and ginger in a large bowl.
Melt the butter with the milk until warm, then add to the dry ingredients.
Stir in the yeast and mix to form a good dough.
Let the dough rise in a warm place.
Shape the dough into a loaf or roll it out and cut into shapes.
Add seeds or currants and lemon essence before baking.

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.

Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,620 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,083 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Allspice + curranttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,359 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, allspice, ginger, butter, milk, lemon):

Orangefits better
Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Currantthe original

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