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Dessert

Pistachio Cake

A cake made from a silver or bride's cake topped with boiled icing flavored with almond and green vegetable coloring, garnished with blanched pistachio nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pistachio Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Bake

  1. Bake a silver or bride's cake in a large, shallow pan.

  2. Let the cake cool completely.

Ice and finish

  1. Cover the cooled cake with boiled icing.

  2. Color the icing green with vegetable coloring and flavor it with almond.

  3. Sprinkle the top with finely chopped blanched pistachio nuts.

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.

  1. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Almond + nutstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Silver or bride's cake
Forms the base layer that the icing and nuts are applied to.
Boiled icing
Adds sweetness and a soft, creamy coating over the cake.
Blanched pistachio nuts
Adds crunch and nutty flavor to the finished top.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, pistachio):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Brazil nutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, pistachio. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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