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Pistachio Tablets

A sweet confection made from pistachios and sugar, colored with spinach-green.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Tablets

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pistachios

  1. Blanch the pistachios and remove the skins.

  2. Plunge the pistachios into water, then drain them.

  3. Place them in a mortar.

  4. Pound to a pulp, adding a little spinach-green for coloring.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the crushed sugar to the feather degree in a sugar-boiler.

  2. Add the pounded pistachio mixture to the sugar.

  3. Boil again to the same degree.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Let cool for five minutes.

  6. Work with a spatula until granulated.

Set and break

  1. Prepare a shallow mold with stiff cartridge paper.

  2. Pour in the hot syrup.

  3. Let it cool slightly.

  4. Mark with a knife into desired shapes.

  5. When cold, break into pieces.

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. Pistachio + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pistachio + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + spinachtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,033 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

Pistachios
Provide the main flavor and the body of the tablets.
Crushed loaf sugar
Forms the sugar syrup that sets into the firm, brittle tablet.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar to the feather degree. Sugar boiled to this stage has the right concentration to set firm but not brittle-hard. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns hard and bitter when it cools.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, 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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