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Dessert

Cream Almonds

A sweet treat of almonds coated in a stiff egg‑white and sugar cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and nuts work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 394 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coating

  1. Beat the egg white until stiff.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the sugar with just enough water to wet it and bring to a boil until it reaches a taffy‑like consistency.

  3. Remove from heat and quickly beat in the egg white until it resembles thick cream.

Coat and dry

  1. Take some of the mixture in your hands and roll an almond in it.

  2. Spread the coated almonds on paper or a board and let them dry for a short time.

  3. They will be ready to eat almost as soon as they are cold.

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 + nutstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Nuts + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

  5. Almond + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Form the centre that the sugar coating encases, giving the sweet a nutty bite.
Egg white
Aerates the hot syrup, turning it into a thick, creamy coating rather than a hard candy.
Sugar
Forms the sweet coating, which cooks to a taffy-like stage and then hardens as it cools.

The step that matters

Beating the egg white into the hot syrup. The syrup thickens quickly as it cools, so the egg white must be beaten in right after removing it from heat. If the mixture cools too far, the sugar can crystallise and turn grainy or set before it coats the almonds.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, egg, sugar. 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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