Name: Bermuda Witches
Ingredients: Savoy cake or rice cake, ½ inch thick; Guava jelly or fine strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly; Fresh grated coconut; Myrtle sprigs for garnish

Why it works: Rice and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,063 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Bermuda Witches

Ingredients

Savoy cake or rice cake, ½ inch thick
Guava jelly or fine strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly
Fresh grated coconut
Myrtle sprigs for garnish

Directions

Prepare

Slice the cake into pieces no thicker than ½ inch and remove the brown edges.
Spread half of the slices with guava jelly or your choice of jelly.
Sprinkle grated coconut over the jelly layer.
Press the remaining slices on top and trim into a neat shape.

Serve

If large, divide the slices 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.

Rice + coconuttop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,063 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Guava + coconuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Rice + guavatop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together15 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).
Guava + myrtletop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Coconut + myrtletop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

What each ingredient does

Savoy cake or rice cake: Provides the soft, absorbent base that holds the layers together.
Guava jelly: Adds sweetness and a moist, sticky layer that binds the slices.
Fresh grated coconut: Adds texture and a mild sweet, chewy contrast within the layers.

“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.