Name: Homey Cookies
Ingredients: ½ cup honey; 1 teaspoon cloves; ⅓ cup sugar; 1 teaspoon baking soda; 2½ cups flour; 1½ teaspoons cinnamon; ½ pound walnut meats, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon allspice; 2 ounces candied orange peel, finely chopped

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Homey Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Sift together the flour, spices, and baking soda.
Add the honey, sugar, walnuts, allspice, and candied orange peel.
Knead the mixture thoroughly.
Roll out the dough thinly and cut with a biscuit cutter.

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.

Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Cinnamon + walnuttop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,147 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Walnut + allspicetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together553 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the walnut

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

Almondfits better
Chickpeafits about as well
Chestnutfits about as well
Walnutthe original

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