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Dessert

Gateau Praline D’amande

A confection made by caramelizing sugar with almonds to produce a powdered praline.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Gateau Praline D’amande

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Slightly brown the almonds in the oven.

Make the praline

  1. In a copper sugar-boiler, combine sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Melt the sugar on the stove without adding water, stirring gently.

  3. When the sugar begins to caramelize, stir in the warm almonds until coated.

  4. Turn out onto a slightly oiled marble slab and spread thin.

Finish and store

  1. Once cold, pound or roll the mixture to a fine powder.

  2. Sift through a fine sieve and store the powder and nibs separately.

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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Blanched almonds
Form the nutty bulk of the praline and hold their shape within the set sugar.
Fine caster sugar
Melts and caramelizes to bind the almonds into a hard, brittle mass.
Lemon juice
Adds a small amount of acidity that helps keep the cooking sugar from crystallizing.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar without water. Dry sugar melts unevenly and can scorch or burn before it fully liquefies. Stirring gently and watching for the first caramelization keeps the colour even and the sugar from turning bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe 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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