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Dessert

Spanish Macaroons

A sweet almond confection made with sugar, egg yolks, cinnamon, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Spanish Macaroons

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the blow stage, forming transparent bubbles when blown through a perforated spoon.

  2. Add the almonds and simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks rapidly until the mixture thickens.

  4. Pour the mixture onto a board or slab covered with sugar.

Shape and dry

  1. Mould it into small balls, roll in sugar, and place on wafer paper on baking tins.

  2. Allow to dry.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Almonds
Provide the bulk and nutty flavour that forms the body of the macaroons.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, when boiled, sets into a structure that holds the balls together.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they heat and bind the almonds and sugar together.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks rapidly until the mixture thickens. Egg yolks can scramble if they sit in hot sugar and almond mixture. Stirring quickly spreads the heat evenly so the yolks thicken smoothly rather than curdling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar, egg, cinnamon. 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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