Name: Bermuda Witches
Ingredients: Savoy cake or pound cake, sliced ⅙ inch thick; Guava jelly or fine strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly; Fresh grated coconut

Why it works: Guava and coconut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bermuda Witches

Ingredients

Savoy cake or pound cake, sliced ⅙ inch thick
Guava jelly or fine strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly
Fresh grated coconut

Directions

Prepare

Slice the cake into pieces no thicker than ⅙ inch and remove the brown edges.
Spread half of the slices with guava jelly or your choice of jelly.
Sprinkle grated coconut evenly over the jelly.
Press the remaining cake slices on top and trim into a neat shape.

Serve

If the slices are large, divide them and arrange them sloppily in the center of a dish on a flat white napkin.
Garnish with small sprigs of myrtle.

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.

Guava + coconuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Jelly: Adds sweetness and moisture, and its stickiness helps the layers hold together.
Fresh grated coconut: Adds moist texture and a delicate chewy contrast between the cake layers.
Savoy or pound cake: Provides the light, tender sponge that forms the body of the layered cake.

“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.