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Baba

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Baba

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the yeast with warm water and set aside.

  2. Make a well in the flour and add salt, sugar, and butter.

  3. Knead the mixture well.

  4. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

  5. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and mix well.

  6. Incorporate the sultana raisins, currants, and candied peel.

  7. Add a pinch of saffron and mix until combined.

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.

  1. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + saffrontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rum + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the saffron

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, egg, rum, raisin, currant):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Saffronthe original

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

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