Name: Polish Baba, or Savarin Au Sirop
Ingredients: 1 lb flour; 1 oz German yeast; 8 oz butter; 2 oz sugar; 6 eggs; ½ lb mixed fruit (citron, pistachio nuts, cherries, currants); 1 teacupful milk

Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Polish Baba, or Savarin Au Sirop

Ingredients

Directions

Warm the milk and mix the yeast until smooth.
In a bowl, combine half the flour with the yeast to form a soft batter.
Sprinkle the remaining flour on top, cover, and let rise in a warm place until it doubles in size.
Cream the butter and sugar in a separate bowl, then mix in 2 eggs until well combined.
Add the butter mixture to the risen batter and beat until light.
Incorporate the remaining 4 eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Prepare the fruit: chop cherries, roughly chop green almonds, and cut citron into small pieces.
Butter 3 or 4 small pudding tins and divide the batter among them.

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.

Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + pistachiotop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together505 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,180 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, pistachio, nuts, milk):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Currantthe original

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