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Another Store-flavouring for Puddings or Cakes

A lemon and almond paste used to flavor puddings or cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Another Store-flavouring for Puddings or Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Grate the lemon rinds and mix with sugar, reducing lumps to powder.

  2. Gradually add the sugar mixture to the bitter almonds and pound until a fine paste forms.

Store

  1. Press the mixture into a small pan and cover with paper. Store for future use.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemon rinds
Provide the bright citrus aroma from the oils held in the zest.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps grind the rind, releasing its aromatic oils.
Bitter almonds
Supply the characteristic bitter almond flavour and aroma.

The step that matters

Grinding the rind with the sugar. Rubbing the zest into the sugar breaks open the tiny oil sacs in the peel, releasing the aromatic oils that give the flavouring its strength. Leaving lumps of rind means less of this oil is released into the paste.

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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