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Clover-leaf Macaroons

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Hazelnut and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 148 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Clover-leaf Macaroons

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grate the hazelnuts finely.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated hazelnuts, egg whites, sugar, and cinnamon.

  3. On a greased baking sheet, place small heaps of the dough, each about the size of a quarter.

  4. Use pieces of citron to create stems connecting the heaps.

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. Hazelnut + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Hazelnut + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + cinnamontop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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 hazelnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutthe original

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

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