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Dessert

Nougat for Ornamenting

A sweet confection made by boiling sugar with lemon juice, adding almonds, and cooling into bars or sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Nougat for Ornamenting

Ingredients

Directions

Make the nougat

  1. Melt the sugar with lemon juice in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Add the chopped almonds and stir until well combined.

  3. Pour the mixture onto a slightly oiled marble slab and let it cool.

Shape and assemble

  1. Once cool, cut into bars or sticks.

  2. To create designs, keep the nougat warm and flatten it on the slab with a rolling pin.

  3. Use a paste-board pattern to cut into desired shapes.

  4. Quickly paste pieces together with caramel sugar while the nougat is still warm.

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 + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Fine white sugar
Melts and sets into the firm, brittle, chewy body of the nougat.
Blanched almonds
Add bite and texture to the set nougat as chopped pieces.
Lemon juice
Acidity helps keep the sugar from crystallising, giving a smoother set.

The step that matters

Keeping the nougat warm while shaping. As sugar cools it becomes hard and brittle, so it cracks if flattened or cut too cold. Working while it is still warm keeps it pliable enough to roll and paste together.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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