Why it works: Almond and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 352 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Filbert Rout Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare a firm smooth paste and roll it out with sifted sugar to ⅛ inch thick.
Use a tin cutter to stamp out leaf shapes resembling filbert hulls.
Surround the bottom of each kernel with four leaves, pinching them together to form a stem.
Cluster two to four kernels together and set them upright on a waxed baking sheet.
Let the cakes dry in a cool place until the next day.
Bake the filberts in a slack heat until dry with little or no color.
Prepare royal icing with the egg white, coloring two-thirds green and the rest brown.
Paint the kernels with brown icing and the leaves with green icing, ensuring the green is a delicate color.
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.
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Almond + spinachtop 4% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together352 recipes
Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
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Almond + chocolatetop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,733 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
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Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together15,404 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together15,679 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
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Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
Swap the spinach
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, almond, egg, chocolate):
- Arrowrootfits better
- Sweet potatofits better
- Beetrootfits better
- Spinachthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond, egg, chocolate. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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