Name: Ice Cream Cake
Ingredients: ¾ cup butter; 2 cups sugar; 1 cup milk; 7 egg whites; 1 teaspoon baking powder; 3½ cups pastry flour; ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar; ½ teaspoon lemon extract; ½ teaspoon orange extract

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ice Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Cream together the butter and ½ cup of sugar.
Add the remaining sugar and cream again.
Alternately add the flour and milk until all but ½ cup of flour is incorporated.
Beat the egg whites with ¼ teaspoon of cream of tartar until stiff peaks form.
Mix the baking powder into the reserved ½ cup of flour and beat it into the batter.
Fold in the beaten egg whites and flavor with lemon and orange extracts.
Divide the batter into two layers and bake.

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.

Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 (butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour, cream, lemon):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Orangethe original

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