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Dessert

Pine Nut

A smooth cream made from ground pine nuts, a Brazil nut, and lemon or orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pine and brazil nut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pine Nut

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grind the pine nuts and Brazil nut until fine.

  2. Add lemon juice or a mixture of lemon and orange juice to create a cream.

  3. Beat the mixture thoroughly until smooth and set aside.

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. Pine + brazil nuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Pine + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together480 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nuts + brazil nuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Brazil nut + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pine nuts
Provide the fat and body that make up the bulk of the cream.
Brazil nut
Adds extra richness and oil to the cream's flavour and texture.
Lemon juice
Acidity brightens the flavour and helps thicken the nut mixture into a cream.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture thoroughly until smooth. Nut pastes need enough mechanical working to break down the ground particles fully. Stopping early leaves a grainy texture instead of a smooth, creamy one.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pine, brazil nut, lemon, orange):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pine, brazil nut, lemon, orange. 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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