Name: London Buns
Ingredients: 1 lb flour; ½ lb butter; ½ lb sugar; ½ lb orange peel, diced; 3 eggs; buttermilk (as needed); essence of lemon (to taste); lump sugar (for sprinkling); 1½ teaspoons baking powder

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

London Buns

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, and baking powder.
Add butter and crumble until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the diced orange peel.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and add them to the mixture, reserving about 1 tablespoon.
Mix well and add just enough buttermilk to moisten the ingredients, keeping the mixture stiff.
Grease a flat baking tin and take a piece of the dough the size of an egg.
Roll it into a ball and place it on the tin, repeating until all dough is used.
Keep the buns 2 inches apart and brush the tops with reserved egg or milk.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,721 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,973 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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 orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, buttermilk, lemon):

Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Blueberryfits about as well
Orangethe original

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