Name: Mothee's Delicious Cookies
Ingredients: 10 hard-boiled eggs; 2 raw eggs; 1 pound best butter; ½ pound almonds; 1 lemon (grated peel); 1 teaspoon cinnamon; ⅓ cup brandy; 1 pound powdered sugar; 1½ pounds flour

Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Mothee's Delicious Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Set a pot of boiling water on the stove. Carefully break the hard-boiled eggs, dropping the whites into a deep dish and setting aside the yolks in their shells in the boiling water until cooked.
Once the yolks are hard-boiled, remove them and let them cool on a plate.
Wash the salt from the butter and cream it with the powdered sugar. Add the grated lemon peel, cinnamon, and half of the blanched and pounded almonds.
Grate the hard-boiled yolks and add them to the mixture along with the 2 raw eggs. Sift in the flour and add the brandy.
Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold half into the dough, reserving the other half.
Flour a baking board well and roll out the dough to about ⅛ inch thick.
Spread the reserved egg whites on top, sprinkle with the remaining pounded almonds, sugar, and cinnamon.

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.

Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,514 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the lemon

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

Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, almond, cinnamon, brandy, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.