Name: Cream, Neapolitan
Ingredients: 1 pint cream; 1 pint milk; 1½ ounces gelatin; 4 ounces loaf sugar; 8 egg yolks; carmine (for coloring red); spinach juice (for coloring green); chopped almonds (for garnish)

Why it works: Spinach and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 352 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Cream, Neapolitan

Ingredients

Directions

Make a rich custard by combining cream, milk, gelatin, loaf sugar, and egg yolks in a saucepan.
Heat gently while stirring until the gelatin and sugar dissolve. Flavor with vanilla.
Divide the custard into three portions. Color one red with carmine, one green with spinach juice, and leave the third plain.
Whip each portion separately until frothy.
While the custard is still warm, pour 1 inch of the red cream into a mold and let it set.
Once set, pour in a layer of the plain cream and let it set again.
Continue layering with the green cream and then the plain cream until the mold is filled.
When the cream is completely cold, carefully turn it out of the mold.
Sprinkle with chopped almonds 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.

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.

Spinach + almondtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together352 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Cream + gelatintop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,628 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,778 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,130 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, milk, gelatin, sugar, egg, almond):

Sweet potatofits better
Arrowrootfits better
Beetrootfits better
Spinachthe original

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