Name: Daintiest of Desserts
Ingredients: 1 box marshmallows, quartered; 1 teacup ground nut meats; 1 pint whipped cream, sweetened and flavored

Why it works: Meat and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,248 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Daintiest of Desserts

Ingredients

1 box marshmallows, quartered
1 teacup ground nut meats
1 pint whipped cream, sweetened and flavored

Directions

Mix the quartered marshmallows, ground nut meats, and sweetened whipped cream together.
Serve very cold.

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.

Meat + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,248 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Marshmallows: Soften and sweeten the cream while setting into a light, spoonable body as they chill.
Ground nut meats: Add texture and a toasty, nutty flavor that contrasts with the soft cream.
Whipped cream: Provides the airy, rich base that holds the mixture together and gives it its light texture.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.