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Dessert

Hazel-nut Sweetmeats

Hazel-nut sweetmeats are small cakes made from hazelnuts, sugar, egg white, and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Hazel-nut Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the nuts

  1. Broil the hazel-nut kernels.

  2. Remove the skin from the kernels.

  3. Chop the kernels finely.

Make the paste

  1. Mix the chopped nuts, pounded sugar, and beaten egg white in a bowl.

  2. Add enough flour to form a paste that is thin like the back of a knife.

  3. Roll out the paste with a rolling pin.

  4. Cut the rolled paste into cakes.

Bake

  1. Grease a pie dish with fine oil.

  2. Place the cakes inside the greased dish.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden.

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. Egg + flourtop 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).

Egg and flour 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

Hazel-nut kernels
Provide the main body and the toasted nutty flavor of the sweetmeats.
Pounded sugar
Adds sweetness and helps bind the chopped nuts into a workable mass.
Egg white
Binds the nuts and sugar together and sets as the cakes bake.
Flour
Gives the paste enough body to be rolled out and cut into cakes.

The step that matters

Add just enough flour. Too much flour makes the paste dry and crumbly, so it cracks when rolled. Too little leaves it sticky and the cakes spread and lose their shape in the oven.

“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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