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Italian Confectioner

An Italian confection of almond paste sweetened with sugar, shaped into tablets or sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,125 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Italian Confectioner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Soak the almonds in water for a day until perfectly white.

  2. Pound the almonds very fine, sprinkling with orange-flower water.

Make the paste

  1. Weigh the almond paste and add 1¼ pounds of loaf sugar for every pound of paste.

  2. Clarify the sugar and boil it until it reaches the little crack stage.

  3. Mix the sugar with the almond paste using a spatula.

  4. Transfer the mixture to an earthen pan to cool.

  5. Once cool, pound it in a mortar until elastic.

  6. Dust a marble slab with sugar, place the paste on it, and shape it into tablets or sticks.

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. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Almonds
Form the bulk of the paste, providing fat, protein and body once ground fine.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the paste and, when boiled, binds the almonds into a firm, shapeable mass.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma to the almond paste.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar to the little crack stage. Sugar boiled only to a lower stage stays too soft to hold the paste, while overboiling makes it brittle and hard to mix. The crack stage gives a firm, workable binder once it cools.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, 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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