Name: Variegated Cakes
Ingredients: 1 cup powdered sugar; ½ cup butter, softened; ½ cup milk; 4 egg whites, whipped; 2½ cups all-purpose flour; Bitter almond flavoring; Spinach juice; Cochineal (red food coloring); Pistachio nuts (optional)

Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Variegated Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Cream the butter and powdered sugar together until light and fluffy.
Add the milk, bitter almond flavoring, whipped egg whites, and flour. Mix until combined.
Divide the batter into three parts.
To make spinach juice, bruise a few spinach leaves in a thin muslin bag and squeeze out the juice.
Add a few drops of spinach juice to one portion of the batter, color another with cochineal, and leave the third portion white.
In small, round pans or cups, layer a little of each colored batter, stirring lightly as you add each color to create a marbled effect.
Place the white batter between the pink and green to enhance the colors.
If available, pound pistachio nuts and add to the green batter for extra flavor.
Ice the sides and top of the cakes once baked.

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.

Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together693 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Spinach + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together110 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Almond + spinachtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together352 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

Swap the pistachio

The recipe marks pistachio as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour, almond, spinach):

Cashew nutfits about as well
Pistachiothe original
Chestnutfits less well
Hazelnutfits less well

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