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Sponge Cake with Fruit

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and grapefruit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 233 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sponge Cake with Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the sponge cake batter and fill a ring mold with it.

  2. Bake the cake until golden and let it cool.

  3. Place the cooled cake on a round platter.

  4. Combine the shredded pineapple, oranges, grapefruit, diced bananas, and quartered grapes in a bowl.

  5. Sweeten the fruit mixture with sugar to taste.

  6. Pour Maraschino liqueur over the fruit and fill the center of the sponge cake with this mixture.

  7. Decorate the top with fresh or Maraschino cherries.

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.

  1. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, orange, banana, grape, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, orange, banana, grape, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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