Name: Queen Cakes
Ingredients: 1 pound currant cake mixture; Butter for greasing pans

Why it works: Currant and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,856 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Queen Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

1 pound currant cake mixture
Butter for greasing pans

Directions

The book says “a brisk oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Prepare the pound currant cake mixture as directed on page 546.
Grease small tin pans (heart-shaped preferred) with butter.
Pour the mixture into the prepared pans.

Bake

Bake in a brisk oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 minutes.

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.

Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,856 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant cake mixture: Provides the rich, tender crumb that forms the body of the queen cakes.
Butter: Greases the pans so the cakes release cleanly and brown evenly at the edges.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.