Name: Cannelons
Ingredients: Eggs; Fine sugar; Apple jelly or other preserve; Almonds d’ Avelines (4 ounces, chopped fine); Sugar (2 ounces); Egg white (1/8 part); Coarse sugar; Pistachios (4 ounces, cut in fillets); Currants (2 ounces, well washed and dried)

Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cannelons

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Shape the cannelons and place them on two plates, 2 inches apart.
Egg wash the cannelons and bake until they have a fine color.
Glaze with fine sugar immediately after removing from the oven.
Remove the cones and place the cannelons on a cold plate.
Fill with apple jelly or your choice of preserve before serving.
For almond cannelons, mix chopped almonds with sugar and egg white, mask the cannelons, and bake until yellow.
For coarse sugar cannelons, mask with coarse sugar instead of almonds.
For pistachio cannelons, egg wash, bake, then mask with beaten egg white and sugar, sprinkle with fine sugar, and cover with pistachios.
For currant cannelons, mask with egg white and sugar, then sprinkle with a mixture of coarse sugar and dried currants.

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.

Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together693 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,918 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Apple + almondtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,025 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,679 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Swap the currant

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

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Apricotfits better
Currantthe original

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