Name: Fruit Cake
Ingredients: 1 cup butter; 1 cup sugar; 4 eggs, well beaten; 1 bar sweet chocolate; 3 teaspoons baking powder; 3 small cups flour; 1 pound raisins; 1 pound almonds, coarsely chopped

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Cream together the butter and sugar.
Add the beaten eggs and melted chocolate, mixing well.
In a separate bowl, combine the baking powder and flour.
Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients.
Dredge the raisins and almonds in 1 cup of flour, then fold them into the batter.
Pour the mixture into a prepared baking pan.

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.

Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,781 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Chocolate + almondtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,733 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, chocolate, flour, almond):

Vanillafits better
Raisinthe original
Coconutfits less well
Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, chocolate, flour, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.