Name: Sour Cream Filling
Ingredients: ½ pound almonds; 1 teacup sour cream; 3 tablespoons sugar; 2 eggs; chopped hickory nuts or any kind of nuts

Why it works: Almond and nuts work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 394 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Sour Cream Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

Blanch the almonds and chop them.
Beat the sour cream until light and thick.
Add the sugar, beaten eggs, and chopped nuts to the sour cream.

Assemble

Spread the mixture between layers of cake.

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 + nutstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together394 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,130 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,679 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together886 recipes

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