Name: Tea-Cakes, to Toast
Ingredients: 8 tea-cakes; butter

Why it works: Tea and butter work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 703 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Tea-Cakes, to Toast

Ingredients

8 tea-cakes
butter

Directions

Prepare

Cut each tea cake into three or four slices based on thickness.

Toast and butter

Toast the slices on both sides over a clear fire.
Spread butter on both sides of each toasted slice.

Serve

Stack the slices on top of each other and cut into quarters.
Serve immediately on a very hot plate.

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.

Tea + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together703 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Tea-cakes: Provide the bread base that toasts into the main body of the dish.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, softening the toast and carrying flavour across the surface.

“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.