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Pistachio Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mixed nuts and walnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 36 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pistachio Cake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare your cake batter as desired.

  2. Mix in 1 ounce of chopped mixed nuts.

  3. Bake the cake until done.

  4. Once baked, ice the cake fully.

  5. Before the icing dries, sprinkle with chopped nuts.

  6. For decoration, use half walnuts or split almonds on top.

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. Mixed nuts + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Mixed nuts + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Chocolate + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mixed nuts, chocolate, walnut):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mixed nuts, chocolate, walnut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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