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Almond Paste

A sweet almond paste made with almonds, egg yolks, flour, butter, and sugar, baked into shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Almond Paste

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Blanch and finely pound the almonds.

  2. Add the egg yolks and enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  3. Incorporate the oiled butter and sweeten with sifted sugar.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake until golden, then cool and fill with creams or jellies.

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 + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Jordan almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the paste once finely pounded.
Egg yolks
Bind the paste and add richness and structure as they set in the oven.
Flour
Gives the paste enough body to hold a stiff shape for rolling and cutting.
Oiled butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a smoother, richer texture.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps it brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Forming the stiff paste. Too much flour makes the paste dry and tough, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to roll and cut. Adding flour only until the paste just holds together keeps the texture tender and workable.

“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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