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Fine Sweetmeat Gingerbread Nuts

A sweet gingerbread dough shaped into nuts, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and coriander match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,498 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fine Sweetmeat Gingerbread Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine the treacle and melted butter, stirring well.

  2. Add the pounded ginger, preserved lemon and orange peels, preserved angelica, coriander seed, and caraway seeds. Mix thoroughly.

  3. Break the eggs into the mixture and combine well.

  4. Gradually add flour until the mixture forms a fine paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into nuts of your desired size and place them on a baking sheet.

  2. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and bake until golden brown.

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. Lemon + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,498 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Lemon + angelicatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together189 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Angelica + carawaytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Treacle
Provides sweetness, dark colour and moisture, and gives the nuts their flavour.
Fresh butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as it sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the paste that gives the dough its body and shape.
Preserved lemon peel
Adds bright acidity and aroma that cut through the sweet treacle.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour should be added gradually until a fine paste forms. Too much flour makes the dough stiff and dry, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to shape into nuts that hold their form in the oven.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ginger, lemon, orange, angelica, coriander, egg):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ginger, lemon, orange, angelica, coriander, egg. 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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