Name: Almond Cookies
Ingredients: 2 pounds butter; 3 pounds sugar; 1 pound shelled almonds; 12 eggs; 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon; ½ teaspoon baking soda; 1 cup boiling water; 1 lemon, grated

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 ↓

Almond Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Mix the butter, sugar, egg yolks, lemon, cinnamon, and hot water together.
Beat the egg whites separately.
Take 3 parts of the beaten egg whites and mix in half of the almonds and enough flour to form a dough.
Roll the dough into cookies and brush the tops with the remaining egg whites.
Scald, dry, and finely chop the remaining almonds, then place them on top of the cookies.
Sprinkle sugar over the cookies before baking.
Bake in the preheated oven until golden.

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).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,655 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon 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 (butter, sugar, almond, egg, cinnamon):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

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