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Dessert

Neapolitan Wafers

A sweet wafer cookie made with flour, sugar, butter, olive oil, eggs, and cinnamon and clove essences.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Neapolitan Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the sugar and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add the eggs (yolks and whites) to the mixture.

  3. Melt the butter in water. Mix the olive oil into the melted butter.

  4. Add the melted butter and olive oil to the bowl.

  5. Incorporate the essences of cinnamon and cloves.

  6. Color the wafers pink or yellow if desired.

Bake

  1. Bake 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Olive + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Olive + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,501 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the wafers set.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and helps the wafers brown.
Olive oil
Adds moisture and tenderness to the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the wafers together.
Sugar
Sweetens the wafers and promotes browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Sugar browns quickly, so the wafers can go from golden to over-browned fast. Watching the color rather than the clock keeps them crisp and evenly colored rather than bitter.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, olive, egg, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, olive, egg, cinnamon. 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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