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Dr. Turton’s Receipt to Make Orgeat

A sweet almond syrup made with sweet and bitter almonds, orange flower water, barley water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and barley share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78 recipes. Both carry acetylpyrazine, which smells roast. The science ↓

Dr. Turton’s Receipt to Make Orgeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the almonds.

  2. In a marble mortar, beat the sweet and bitter almonds with a little orange-flower water until they form a fine paste.

Make the syrup

  1. Mix the paste with cold barley water.

  2. Sweeten with sugar to taste.

  3. Strain the mixture through muslin.

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 + barleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together78 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

  3. Orange + barleytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together79 recipes

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

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Sweet almonds
Provide the main nutty body and creamy texture of the drink.
Bitter almonds
Add a sharper, more intense almond aroma and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the bitterness of the almonds.

The step that matters

Beating the almonds to a fine paste. Almonds must be ground small enough that their oils and flavour release into the liquid. Coarse pieces leave a gritty texture and weak flavour, and straining later cannot fully remove them.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, barley, sugar. 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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