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Dessert

Flat Ginger Bread Nuts

A gingerbread dough with allspice, ginger, citrus peel, sweetmeats, and treacle, baked into flat nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Flat Ginger Bread Nuts

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.

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour onto your work surface and create a wall.

  2. Add the treacle, moist sugar, butter, allspice, ginger, and finely chopped peels.

  3. Mix everything together to form a paste, using as little extra flour as possible.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to the size of a half crown.

  2. Flatten the pieces slightly with your fingers.

  3. Bake on buttered paper in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  4. Remove them as soon as they are baked to prevent sticking.

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. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Allspice + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together727 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the paste together and lets it be rolled and shaped.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark colour that browns during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, crisp texture in the baked nut.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the nuts brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Removing the nuts as soon as they are baked. Gingerbread holds sugar that keeps softening and sticking to hot paper as it cools. Lifting the nuts off promptly prevents them from fusing to the paper and breaking when removed.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, allspice, ginger, sugar, flour, lemon):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, allspice, ginger, sugar, flour, lemon. 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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