Name: Banbury Cake Meat
Ingredients: ½ lb butter; 6 oz flour; 1 lb currants; 1 oz ground cinnamon; ½ lb moist sugar; 2 oz candied orange peel; 2 oz candied lemon peel; ¼ oz allspice

Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Banbury Cake Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Cream the butter in a mixing bowl.
Finely chop the candied orange and lemon peels.
Mix all the ingredients together until well combined.
Transfer the mixture to a jar and cover it tightly.

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.

Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,437 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Orange + allspicetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together727 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,083 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 (butter, flour, cinnamon, sugar, orange, lemon, allspice):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Limefits better
Currantthe original

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