Skip to main content
Dessert

Almond Biscuits

A sweet biscuit made with almonds, flour, eggs, and sugar, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a cool oven”. The 300°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Blanch and pound the almonds, sprinkling with fine sugar.

  2. Prepare paper molds about the size of two fingers square and butter them.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the almonds for 15 minutes with flour, egg yolks, and sugar.

  2. Fold in the whipped egg whites gently.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the molds with the mixture and sprinkle equal parts flour and powdered sugar on top.

  2. Bake in a cool oven (300°F / 150°C) until golden brown, then remove from molds.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 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

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the biscuits.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they trap air that lightens the mixture and helps it rise.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the almond mixture together.
Flour
Gives a small amount of structure so the biscuits hold their shape.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the biscuits and helps them brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Stirring or beating them down removes that trapped air, so the biscuits will be denser and rise less in the oven.

“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.

More almond biscuits recipes

Bitter 9 See all 31 →

You might also like

Almond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipesCoconut Almond CakeCoconut Almond Cake17 recipes