Name: Chocolate Harlequin Pistachios
Ingredients: sweet chocolate; blanched pistachio nuts; nonpareils of mixed colours; fancy papers with mottoes

Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Chocolate Harlequin Pistachios

Ingredients

sweet chocolate
blanched pistachio nuts
nonpareils of mixed colours
fancy papers with mottoes

Directions

Warm the sweet chocolate by pounding it in a mortar.
Take some chocolate and wrap it around a blanched pistachio nut.
Roll it in your hand to shape it like an olive.
Drop it into nonpareils to coat it in various colors.
Repeat with the remaining pistachio nuts.
Fold them in colored or fancy papers with mottoes, fringed at the ends.

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.

Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together440 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Chocolate + pistachiotop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together209 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).