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Dessert

Italian Meringues

A sweet dessert made with sugar, water, egg whites, and blanched almonds, baked until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Italian Meringues

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water slowly until it begins to crystallize, forming long threads when you jerk the skimmer.

Make and finish the meringue

  1. Pour the hot syrup into the stiffly beaten egg whites and stir for 5 to 10 minutes off the heat.

  2. Sprinkle the top with split blanched almonds.

  3. Bake at 300°F (150°C) like French meringues.

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).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + almondtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup and sweetens the meringue, while its syrup stiffens the whites.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that traps air and forms the meringue's structure.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar syrup to the thread stage. If the syrup is too cool it will not set the whites properly, and if it goes too far it can turn grainy or brown. Watching for long threads when the skimmer is lifted tells you it has reached the right concentration.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Milletfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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