Skip to main content
Dessert

Italian Confectioner

A confection made by boiling almonds and sugar to a crack stage, then shaping into tablets or sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Italian Confectioner

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil the mixture until it reaches a little crack stage.

  2. Add sugar to the almonds and mix well with a spatula.

  3. Remove the paste and let it cool in an earthen pan.

Shape the confection

  1. Once cool, pound it in a mortar until it is elastic.

  2. Dust a marble slab with powdered sugar, place the paste on it, and shape it into tablets or roll it into 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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the body of the paste and give it a nutty flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once boiled, helps the paste set firm as it cools.

The step that matters

Boiling to the little crack stage. As water boils off, the sugar becomes more concentrated, so the stopping point sets the paste's texture. Stopping too early leaves it sticky, while going too far makes it brittle once cooled.

“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.

You might also like

Almond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipesCoconut Almond CakeCoconut Almond Cake17 recipes