Name: Guava Shortcake
Ingredients: 2 quarts strawberry guavas; sugar; biscuit dough; butter

Why it works: Strawberry and guava share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Guava Shortcake

Ingredients

2 quarts strawberry guavas
sugar
biscuit dough
butter

Directions

Prepare the guava

Mash the strawberry guavas and mix with sugar.
Let stand for 2 hours.

Make the shortcake

Prepare a biscuit dough.
Bake it in a pie tin.
When the biscuit is done and still hot, cut the edges.
Pull apart with forks.
Turn the crumb sides up.
Spread butter on them.
Place the sugared guava on both sides.
Stack one layer on top of the other.

Serve

Leave the juice in the container.
Serve the sugared guava juice as a sauce with the shortcake.

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.

Strawberry + guavatop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Strawberry + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,149 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Strawberry + biscuittop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together102 recipes

Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).
Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,009 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,874 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberry guavas: Provide the main fruit flavor and, once sugared, the filling and sauce.
Sugar: Sweetens the guava and draws out juice as it stands.
Biscuit dough: Forms the tender, layered shortcake that holds the fruit.
Butter: Adds richness and fat that softens the biscuit crumb.

Swap the guava

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (strawberry, sugar, biscuit, butter):

Vanillafits better
Peachfits better
Blueberryfits better
Guavathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against strawberry, sugar, biscuit, butter. 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.