Name: Hickory Nut Cake
Ingredients: White Cake ingredients (as for Lemon Jelly Cake); a few drops of almond flavoring; hickory nuts (for assembly)

Why it works: Almond and nuts work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 394 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Hickory Nut Cake

Ingredients

White Cake ingredients (as for Lemon Jelly Cake)
a few drops of almond flavoring
hickory nuts (for assembly)

Directions

Prepare a White Cake using the same method as for Lemon Jelly Cake.
Add a few drops of almond flavoring to the batter.
Bake in round or square tins.
Assemble the cake with hickory nuts.

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 + nutstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together394 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,655 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lemon + nutstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together470 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).