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Dessert

Almond Preserved

A preserved green almond confection made by boiling almonds with bran, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and sugar 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 ↓

Almond Preserved

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. In a saucepan, bring water and bran to a boil.

  2. Add green almonds and boil once.

  3. Remove almonds with a skimmer and rub off the down, placing them in cold water.

  4. Boil almonds in water until a pin easily enters and they shrink.

Make the syrup

  1. Clarify sugar, using 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  2. Boil the syrup for four to five days, morning and evening, without the fruit.

Preserve and serve

  1. Drain the fruit on a sieve.

  2. When the syrup is lukewarm, pour it over the fruit until they look very green.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green almonds
Form the preserved fruit, which is firmed and softened through the boiling and syrup steps.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, preserves it.
Bran
Flavours the cooking water used in the first boil.

The step that matters

Boiling the almonds until a pin easily enters. Boiling must soften the fruit enough for a pin to pass through while the almonds still hold their shape. Stopping too early leaves them hard and bitter, and boiling too long lets them break apart.

“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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