Why it works: Orange and coconut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓
Angels Food
Ingredients
Directions
Peel the sweet oranges and remove as much of the white pith as possible.
Slice the oranges thinly, discarding the seeds.
Layer the orange slices in a glass dish, sprinkling a little sugar and grated coconut between layers.
Repeat the layering until the dish is full, finishing with grated coconut on top.
Prepare additional oranges, cut them small, and squeeze the juice over the coconut using a potato squeezer.
Make this dish an hour before serving and chill in the icebox.
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.
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Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together584 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together5,742 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
Swap the coconut
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):
- Vanillafits better
- Lemonfits better
- Figfits better
- Coconutthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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