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Dessert

Almond Cheesecakes

A baked almond cheesecake made with sweet and bitter almonds, butter, sugar, lemon peel, cream, eggs, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Almond Cheesecakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the sweet and bitter almonds, then dry them for 30 minutes.

  2. Pound the almonds with the rose or orange-flower water in a mortar.

Make the filling

  1. In a warm place, soften the butter and mix in the almond paste, sugar, lemon peel, cream, and eggs.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover a pâte pan with puff pastry, fill it with the mixture, and decorate with candied lemon peel and split almonds.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  5. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 bulk and body of the filling once pounded into a paste.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set into a firm, sliceable custard.
Bitter almonds
Add a deeper, slightly bitter almond aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Pound the almonds with the flower water. Pounding the blanched, dried almonds with the flower water breaks them into a fine, smooth paste. Coarse or unevenly ground almonds leave a gritty texture in the finished cheesecake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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