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Dessert

Petits Fours

Petits fours are small, sweet pastries made from whipped egg whites, sugar, and chopped hazelnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and hazelnut work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Petits Fours

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the mixture

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gradually add the sugar while continuing to whip.

  3. Fold in the chopped hazelnuts gently.

Bake

  1. Spoon the mixture onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until lightly golden.

Cool and serve

  1. Let cool before serving.

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 + hazelnuttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + hazelnuttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together518 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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 petits fours their airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps stabilize the whipped whites so the foam holds its shape.
Hazelnuts
Add nutty flavor and body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites and adding the sugar. The whites must reach stiff peaks, and the sugar must be added gradually. Fat or under-whipped whites will not foam well, and sugar added slowly stabilizes the foam. Folding the hazelnuts gently keeps the trapped air in the mixture so the petits fours bake up light.

Swap the hazelnut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutthe original

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

“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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