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Sponge Cake As a Melon Ornamented with Fruit

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sponge Cake As a Melon Ornamented with Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Roll out long lengths of gum paste very fine.

  2. Place one piece in each niche of the cake.

  3. Lay gum paste leaves on each side of the stalk.

  4. Roll out a piece of paste the thickness of a natural stalk, cut it at an angle, about 2 inches long.

  5. Lay four or five leaves on one end of the melon and fix the stalk in the middle.

  6. Model fruit and fix them on the leaves in the niches of the cake.

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.

  1. Pear + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apricot + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Melon + peartop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together49 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Grape + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (melon, apricot, pear, plum):

  1. Peachfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against melon, apricot, pear, plum. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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