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Dessert

Petits Fours

Petits fours are small sweet biscuits made from powdered sugar, flour, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Petits Fours

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar while continuing to whip.

  3. Gently fold in the flour until just combined.

Pipe and bake

  1. Pipe the mixture onto waxed paper in 22 lines long and 3 lines wide, spacing them 3 lines apart.

  2. Place the trays in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until the tops are dry to the touch.

  3. Remove from the oven and detach the biscuits with a flexible knife.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the biscuits their light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the piped biscuits together once baked.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and stabilizes the whipped egg white foam as it is added.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour. Overmixing after the flour goes in knocks air out of the whipped egg whites and develops gluten, making the biscuits dense and flat. Fold gently and stop as soon as the flour is just combined.

“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.

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