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Gingerbread in Cakes or Nuts

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Gingerbread in Cakes or Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

  1. In a bowl, combine treacle, flour, butter, ground ginger, and moist sugar.

  2. Add chopped citron, lemon peel, orange peel, and zests; mix well.

  3. Make a well in the center and pour in the treacle; mix with a spoon until combined.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and prepare baking sheets by cleaning them.

  5. Brush the sheets lightly with warm clarified butter and let them cool.

  6. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto the sheets, spacing them evenly.

  7. Bake for a few minutes until done; they should be firm but not overbaked.

  8. Allow to cool on the sheets before transferring to storage.

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

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

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, lemon, orange):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

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

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