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Burnt Almonds

Burnt almonds are made by boiling sugar and water, adding almonds, and toasting the mixture until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Burnt Almonds

Why it works: Sugar and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Burnt Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar syrup

  1. Boil 5 lbs of loaf sugar with 2 pints of water.

  2. Once boiling, add 2½ lbs of Valencia almonds and boil until it reaches ball height.

  3. Remove from heat and stir with a spatula until it becomes powdery.

Sift and coat

  1. Sift the mixture through a coarse sieve and divide into three or four equal portions.

  2. Place a thin iron plate over the stove and put one portion in a pan on top of the plate.

  3. Allow the siftings to dissolve and adhere to the almonds until they become crisp, checking by taste.

  4. Repeat with the remaining portions.

Finish with syrup

  1. For a crinkly finish, boil 5 lbs of sugar in another pan.

  2. Clean the almond pan and pour the syrup over the almonds in two coats, stirring each time.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that hardens into a crisp, sweet, powdery coating on the almonds.
Valencia almonds
Provide the core that the sugar coating adheres to and crisps around.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar to a powder. Stirring after the syrup reaches ball height makes the sugar recrystallize into a powder rather than a solid mass. Stopping too early or too late changes how the coating forms and how crisp it becomes.

“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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