Name: Stuffed Figs
Ingredients: figs; almonds or English walnuts, blanched and chopped fine

Why it works: Fig and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 519 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stuffed Figs

Ingredients

figs
almonds or English walnuts, blanched and chopped fine

Directions

Prepare

Wash the figs and remove the stems.
Fill the center of each fig with blanched and finely chopped almonds or English walnuts.
To blanch the nuts, pour boiling water over them, let stand until the husk loosens, then rub off the husk.

Steam

Steam the stuffed figs until tender.

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.

Fig + almondtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together519 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Figs: Provide the soft, sweet body that becomes tender and holds the filling.
Almonds or english walnuts: Add crunch and richness to the filling inside each fig.

“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.