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Dessert

Creole Kisses

A sweet baked confection made from confectioner's sugar, egg whites, vanilla, nuts, and baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and nuts work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Creole Kisses

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the meringue

  1. Beat together the confectioner's sugar and egg whites for 1-5 minutes until fluffy.

  2. Add the cream of tartar and continue beating until stiff peaks form.

Bake and shape

  1. Mix in the vanilla extract and chopped nuts.

  2. Spread the mixture in a thin layer on a baking sheet.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  4. Remove from the oven, cut into narrow strips, and roll them over small sticks while still hot.

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. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Confectioner's sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and dissolves into the egg whites to form the base.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that gives the mixture its light, airy structure and sets when baked.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites, helping the peaks hold their shape.
Chopped nuts
Add texture and crunch to the set mixture.

The step that matters

Shape the strips while still hot. Once the baked mixture cools it becomes brittle and can crack or snap instead of bending around the sticks, so the strips should be rolled promptly after cutting.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, cream, vanilla. 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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