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Snack

Devilled Almonds

A snack of browned almonds seasoned with cayenne pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Devilled Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the almonds and wipe them dry.

Fry

  1. In a frying pan, heat the butter.

  2. Add the almonds and fry gently until they are a good brown color.

  3. Drain the almonds on a wire rack.

Season and serve

  1. Sprinkle with Cayenne pepper and salt, then serve hot.

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 + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  2. Almond + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,566 recipes

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

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Jordan almonds
Provide the main body of the snack, and their surface browns in the butter to develop flavor.
Butter
Fat that conducts heat evenly and carries flavor, helping the almonds brown gently.

The step that matters

Fry gently until deep brown. Butter browns and can burn quickly at high heat, and the milk solids darken fast. Gentle frying lets the almonds color evenly through the sugar and proteins on their surface without turning bitter.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Lima beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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