Name: Cinnamon Rolls
Ingredients: 1 piece of pie crust; cinnamon; butter (for greasing)

Why it works: Cinnamon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,784 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Cinnamon Rolls

Ingredients

1 piece of pie crust
cinnamon
butter (for greasing)

Directions

Prepare

Roll out the pie crust and cut it into narrow strips.
Sprinkle cinnamon over the strips.
Roll each strip up tightly.

Bake and serve

Place the rolls in a clean, well-greased tin pan.
Bake until browned nicely and serve.

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.

Cinnamon + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,784 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Pie crust: Forms the dough wrapper that holds the cinnamon filling and bakes into flaky layers.
Cinnamon: Provides the aromatic, warm flavour of the filling.
Butter: Greases the tin so the rolls release cleanly and brown on the bottom.

“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.