Name: Nut Drop Cakes
Ingredients: 1 cup brown sugar; ½ cup butter; 1 cup chopped raisins; 1 cup chopped walnuts; 1 cup all-purpose flour; 2 eggs; 4 teaspoons baking soda; Spices (cassia, nutmeg, and cloves to taste)

Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Drop Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cream the butter and brown sugar together.
Stir in the well-beaten eggs.
Mix the raisins, walnuts, and spices with the flour.
Dissolve the baking soda in warm water and add it to the mixture.
Beat thoroughly and drop spoonfuls onto a baking pan.

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.

Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,230 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,377 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Cassia + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together40 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Swap the cassia

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, raisin, walnut, flour, egg, nutmeg):

Cinnamonfits better
Allspicefits better
Capersfits better
Cassiathe original

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