Name: Buckwheat Cakes
Ingredients: ½ cup tepid water; 2 quarts warm water; 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); 2 quarts buckwheat flour; ½ teaspoon baking soda; ½ cup boiling water; good lard for greasing

Why it works: Buckwheat and flour work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 660 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Buckwheat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Dissolve the yeast in ½ cup of tepid water.
In a large crock, combine 2 quarts of warm water, the dissolved yeast, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt.
Stir in 2 quarts of buckwheat flour and let it stand in a warm place overnight.
In the morning, dissolve ½ teaspoon of baking soda in ½ cup of boiling water and stir it into the batter.
Grease a hot griddle with lard and bake the batter.
For leftover batter, add 1 quart of tepid water, 1 quart of buckwheat flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and ½ tablespoon of coarse sea salt in the evening.
Beat well and set aside to rise overnight, then add baking soda and boiling water in the morning.

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.

Buckwheat + flourtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together660 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Sugar + buckwheattop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together198 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).