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Green Gage Biscuit

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and angelica work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 49 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Green Gage Biscuit

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.

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Mix flour, eggs, sugar, ground ginger, butter, and ammonia until well combined.

  3. Shape the dough into plum-sized biscuits.

  4. Stick two halves together with green gage jam.

  5. Cover the biscuits with more jam.

  6. Dip in glace icing colored with spinach green using a silver fork.

  7. Once dried, insert a thin twig of green angelica to form the stalk.

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. Ginger + angelicatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together49 recipes

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

  2. Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ginger + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together403 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Spinach + angelicatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the angelica

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, ginger, butter, spinach. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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