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Polish Baba

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Polish Baba

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sift the flour and set aside ¾ pound for leavening with yeast and lukewarm water.

  2. Make a fountain with the remaining flour, adding salt, sugar, cream, eggs, and butter.

  3. Incorporate the leaven when it has risen, then mix well and create a hollow in the center.

  4. Pour in the Madeira wine and saffron infusion, then add currants, raisins, and candied cedrata.

  5. Mix everything thoroughly and set aside ⅛ of the dough, smoothing its surface.

  6. Line a well-buttered mold with the dough, removing the largest pieces of raisins to prevent sticking.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + saffrontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together447 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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, cream, egg, butter, madeira wine, currant):

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

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

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