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Salted or Devilled Almonds

Roasted almonds flavored with salt or cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Salted or Devilled Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the almonds in warm water for 1–2 minutes and remove the skins.

  2. Melt a small amount of butter in an enamelled pan.

Fry and season

  1. Add the almonds to the pan and dust with coarse sea salt for salted almonds or with cayenne and salt for devilled almonds.

  2. Fry the almonds until they are crisp and pale gold in color.

Drain and store

  1. Drain the almonds on a sieve and store in a tin canister.

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 + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Almond + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,566 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the main crunchy body of the snack once fried until crisp.
Butter
Conducts heat into the nuts and adds richness and golden browning during frying.

The step that matters

Frying until pale gold. Almonds keep darkening after they leave the pan because residual heat continues cooking them. Removing them when they are crisp and pale gold helps prevent a bitter, over-browned flavour.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Lima beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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