Name: Baking Powder
Ingredients: ½ pound cream of tartar; ¼ pound baking soda; 3 teaspoons baking powder for 4 cups flour; 1½ teaspoons baking powder for an ordinary-sized cake

Why it works: Cream and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Baking Powder

Ingredients

½ pound cream of tartar
¼ pound baking soda
3 teaspoons baking powder for 4 cups flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder for an ordinary-sized cake

Directions

Make the mixture

Combine cream of tartar and baking soda.
Roll smoothly and sift several times.

Use the mixture

Use 3 teaspoons of the mixture for every 4 cups of flour.
For an ordinary-sized cake, use 1½ teaspoons of the mixture.

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.

Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,481 recipes

Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream of tartar: Provides acidity that reacts with baking soda to release carbon dioxide for rising.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the batter.

“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.