Silver linden + Feijoa
Tilia tomentosa (Silver Lime in the UK and Silver Linden in the US) is a species of Tilia native to southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, from Hungary and the Balkans east to western Turkey, occurring at moderate altitudes. It is a deciduous tree growing to 20–35 m tall, with a trunk up to 2 m diameter. The leaves are alternately arranged, rounded to triangular-ovate, 4–13 cm long and broad with a 2.5–4 cm petiole, green and mostly hairless above, densely white tomentose with white hairs below, and with a coarsely toothed margin. The flowers are pale yellow, hermaphrodite, produced in cymes of three to ten in mid to late summer with a pale green subtending leafy bract; they have a strong scent and are pollinated by honeybees. The nectar however contains sugars which cannot be digested by other bees, to whom the tree is somewhat toxic. The fruit is a dry nut-like drupe 8–10 mm long, downy, and slightly ribbed.

Acca sellowiana, a species of flowering plant in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, is native to the highlands of southern Brazil, eastern Paraguay, Uruguay, northern Argentina, and Colombia. It is widely cultivated as a garden plant and fruiting tree in New Zealand, and can be found as a garden plant elsewhere such as in Australia, Azerbaijan, western Georgia and southern Russia. Common names include feijoa, pineapple guava and guavasteen. It is an evergreen, perennial shrub or small tree, 1?7 metres (3.3?23.0 ft) in height, widely cultivated as a garden plant and fruiting tree.
Shared flavor compounds
These compounds appear in both Silver linden and Feijoa, giving them a molecular basis for flavor affinity, the pairing principle articulated by Francois Benzi and implemented in flavor-pairing research.
Why it works
The flavor-pairing hypothesis proposes that ingredients sharing significant aromatic compounds harmonize on the palate. Silver linden and Feijoa overlap on 20 key compound(s), which is why classic culinary traditions, and our deterministic matching algorithm, place them together.
- Pairing computed by: pairing-compute
- Methodology: deterministic compound-overlap matching (no LLM)
- Compound data: Wikidata + Wikidata
- Part of: Living Gastronomic Intelligence graph