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Dessert

Pistachio Comfits

A confection of pistachio kernels coated with sugar and flavored with rose or orange flower essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and rose work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 135 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistachio Comfits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Dry the pistachio kernels in the stove.

  2. Fill the hollow at the top of the pistachios with sugar.

  3. Sift sugar through a silk sieve and powder the nuts in the first three charges to cover any irregularities.

Flavor the sugar

  1. Clarify sugar with distilled water of chosen flowers for a floral flavor.

  2. Add different essences to the middle layers for additional flavor and color.

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. Pistachio + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Pistachio + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachio kernels
Form the body of the confit and carry the sugar and flavorings.
Sugar
Fills the hollows and forms a sweet coating over the nuts.

Swap the pistachio

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiothe original
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rose. 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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