Name: Peach Short Cake
Ingredients: 2 cups flour; 4 teaspoons baking powder; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon sugar; 2 tablespoons butter; sweet milk (enough to make a soft dough); sliced peaches; sugar (for topping); whipped cream (sweetened and flavored with orange)

Why it works: Peach and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 385 recipes. Both carry pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Peach Short Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar.
Mix in butter and enough sweet milk to make a soft dough.
Roll out into 2 cakes and butter them.
Stack one cake on top of the other.
Separate the cakes, butter well, and spread with sliced peaches and sugar.
Serve with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with orange.

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.

Peach + orangetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together385 recipes

Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together781 recipes

Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, milk, peach, cream):

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Strawberryfits better
Orangethe original

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