Name: Nut Frosting
Ingredients: cream frosting; chopped hickory nuts; chopped English walnuts; chopped almonds

Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Nut Frosting

Ingredients

cream frosting
chopped hickory nuts
chopped English walnuts
chopped almonds

Directions

Make cream frosting.
Mix in desired quantities of chopped nuts.
Optionally, place half of the nuts on top of the frosting instead of mixing them in.

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.

Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together993 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Nuts + almondtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together394 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,130 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together886 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).