Name: Gateau of Apricots
Ingredients: 1 Sponge Cake (baked in a plain mold); ½ pint Cream; 5 oz Pistachio Nuts; 1 lb Castor Sugar; 1 lb Dessicated Coconut; Whites of 2 Eggs; ½ oz Sugar; Essence of Vanilla

Why it works: Coconut and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,294 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Gateau of Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the inside out of the sponge cake.
Mix together the coconut, sugar, and egg whites.
Cover the sides of the cake with the mixture.
Blanch and chop the pistachios, then sprinkle them lightly over the coconut.
Fill the center of the cake with apricots.
Whip the cream, adding a few drops of vanilla essence and the sugar.
Place the cream in a piping bag with a rose tip and pipe it on top of the cake.
For a better effect, color some of the cream pink with a few drops of cochineal.

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.

Coconut + vanillatop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,294 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).
Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Pistachio + coconuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together73 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Pistachio + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together407 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Nuts + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together638 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, pistachio, sugar, coconut, egg, vanilla):

Almondfits better
Cashew nutfits better
Macadamia nutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pistachio, sugar, coconut, egg, vanilla. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.