Name: Variegated Cakes
Ingredients: 1 cup powdered sugar; ½ cup butter, creamed; ½ cup milk; 4 egg whites, whipped light; 2½ cups prepared flour; Bitter almond flavoring; Spinach juice; Cochineal

Why it works: Almond and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 352 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Variegated Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.
Add the milk, bitter almond flavoring, whipped egg whites, and flour to the mixture.
Divide the batter into three parts.
Bruise a few spinach leaves in a thin muslin bag to extract the juice.
Add a few drops of spinach juice to one portion of the batter, color another with cochineal, and leave the third portion white.
Spoon a little of each colored batter into small, round pans or cups, stirring lightly as you add each color to create a marbled effect.
Layer the white batter between the pink and green for better color contrast.
If available, add crushed pistachio nuts to the green batter for enhanced flavor.
Ice the sides and top of the cakes.

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.

Almond + spinachtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together352 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,564 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Swap the spinach

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

Arrowrootfits better
Sweet potatofits better
Chivefits better
Spinachthe original

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