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Dessert

Nonpareil Crackers

A sweet cracker made with flour, sugar, butter, lard, and a nonpareil paste of almonds, eggs, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Nonpareil Crackers

Ingredients

Directions

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

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, ammonia, sugar, baking soda, butter, eggs, lard, and flavoring.

  2. Add water and milk gradually until a dough forms.

  3. Roll out the dough and cut with special cutters.

  4. Coat the cutouts with rough sugar candy.

Make the nonpareils

  1. For the nonpareils, mix blanched almonds, eggs, powdered sugar, lemon zest, and flour into a stiff paste.

  2. Shape the paste into olive shapes, about 1x2 inches.

  3. Brush the shaped nonpareils with sugar and bake in a cool oven (300°F/150°C).

  4. Once baked, place them on a rolling pin to shape like orange quarters.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and paste together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich, crumbly texture in the crackers.
Eggs
Bind the dough and paste and add richness and structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown and crisp as it bakes.
Blanched almonds
Supply the nutty body and moisture of the nonpareil paste.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the crackers short and tender.

The step that matters

Baking the nonpareils in a cool oven. A low oven dries the almond paste gently so it sets without browning too fast. Too much heat would brown or crack the shaped pieces before they are fully dried through.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, egg, milk, almond, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, egg, milk, almond, lemon. 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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