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Dessert

P Ate Roy Ale

A shortbread-like pastry made with butter, sugar, lemon, flour, eggs, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond 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 ↓

P Ate Roy Ale

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Combine butter, sugar, water, salt, and lemon rind in a saucepan. Bring to a boil.

  2. Remove from heat and discard the lemon rind. Gradually add flour while stirring continuously.

  3. Return to heat and stir for 5 minutes until the mixture pulls away from the sides.

  4. Transfer to a bowl and add eggs one at a time until the paste is sticky.

Shape and bake

  1. Butter and flour a baking sheet. Shape the paste into walnut-sized balls.

  2. Insert blanched almonds into each ball and brush with egg yolks.

  3. Dust with powdered sugar and bake 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.

  1. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Provides structure, setting the paste so the balls hold their shape while baking.
Eggs
Add moisture and structure, and make the paste glossy and sticky enough to pipe or shape.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, contributing tenderness and flavor to the paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the baked surface brown.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs. Eggs must be added one at a time and the paste beaten until smooth and sticky. Adding them too fast can make the dough split or stay loose, and the balls may spread or fail to puff in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, almond. 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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