Name: Hunting Nuts
Ingredients: 1 pound flour; ½ pound treacle; ½ pound brown sugar; 6 ounces butter; grated ginger to taste

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hunting Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the biscuits

Mix the flour, treacle, brown sugar, butter, and grated ginger together until well combined.
Shape the mixture into small nuts.
Place them on a baking tin.

Bake

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 30 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.

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 + gingertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,564 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together14,054 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour: Provides the structure that holds the biscuits together as they bake.
Treacle: Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark, rich flavour to the dough.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the biscuits brown during baking.
Butter: Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the finished biscuits.
Grated ginger: Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the biscuits.