Skip to main content
Dessert

Petits Fours

Petits Fours are small sugar confections flavored with saffron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and saffron work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 650 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Petits Fours

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. Cook 6 ounces of sugar until it reaches the hard crack stage.

  2. Add a small amount of saffron to the sugar.

  3. Pour half of the sugar onto a marble surface.

  4. Mix the saffron into the other half of the sugar and pour it onto the marble, slightly overlapping the first.

Shape the confection

  1. Work the sugar with a knife until it becomes brittle and separates into threads.

  2. Combine the sugar from both hands, forming a mass.

  3. Continue working until the sugar is too brittle to handle.

  4. Form a ring with the compact sugar and hang it until cool.

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 + saffrontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together650 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the brittle glassy structure of the confection once cooked to hard crack and worked.
Saffron
Adds colour and aroma to the sugar, giving the marbled pattern when mixed into one half.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar to hard crack stage. Sugar must reach the hard crack stage, where little water remains, so that it sets hard and brittle when cooled. Undercooked sugar stays tacky and will not hold its shape.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes