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Dessert

French Nougat

A sweet confection made by boiling sugar and water, adding blanched almonds, and setting into a pan to cool into bars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and almond 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 ↓

French Nougat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Boil the sugar and water in a saucepan over high heat until it begins to turn yellow; do not stir while boiling.

  2. Preheat the oven.

Toast the almonds

  1. Place the blanched almonds inside the oven, leaving the door open until they start to look yellow.

Shape and set

  1. Quickly add the almonds to the sugar mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well‑oiled pan, about ½ inch thick.

  3. Before the nougat cools, mark it into bars using a sharp knife.

  4. Gently bend the pan between your hands to remove the nougat.

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. Sugar + almondtop 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

Granulated sugar
Melts and caramelizes to form the sweet, brittle body of the nougat.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can boil evenly before caramelizing.
Blanched almonds
Add crunch and nutty flavor that contrast with the chewy sugar.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar without stirring. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup can trigger crystallization, making the nougat grainy instead of smooth. Watch the color closely, since sugar goes from golden to burnt quickly.

“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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