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Dessert

Flat Ginger-Bread Nuts

A flat gingerbread dough mixed with butter, sweetmeats, allspice, ginger, and citrus peel, baked into nut-shaped pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 well.

  2. Add the treacle, moist sugar, butter, allspice, ginger, and finely chopped orange, lemon, and citron peel into the well.

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

  4. Roll out the dough to about the size of a half crown.

Shape and bake

  1. Flatten the pieces slightly with your fingers and place them on buttered paper on baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until done, then remove immediately 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the nuts together.
Treacle
Adds moisture, dark sweetness and chewy texture to the dough.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, helping the nuts brown during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness in the finished nuts.
Sweetmeats
Adds candied peel flavour and sweetness throughout the dough.

The step that matters

Removing the nuts from the baking sheets promptly. Treacle-rich dough becomes sticky and hardens as it cools, so leaving the nuts on the hot sheet can make them stick and break when lifted.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

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