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Dessert

Vienna Biscuits

Vienna biscuits are made from hazelnuts, almonds, caster sugar, lemon, and egg whites, then iced with glace royale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Hazelnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 186 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vienna Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Chop the hazelnuts and almonds finely and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add the caster sugar, grated lemon rind, lemon juice, and egg whites to the bowl.

  3. Mix all the ingredients together to form a paste.

  4. Turn out the paste and roll it out.

Shape and ice

  1. Cut the rolled dough into finger-sized strips.

  2. Ice the strips with glace royale.

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. Hazelnut + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Hazelnut + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together205 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Hazelnuts
Add nutty flavor and body, giving the dough a rich, crumbly texture.
Almonds
Add nutty flavor and fine texture as they form the base of the paste.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps give a fine, tender crumb.
Egg whites
Bind the ground nuts and sugar into a paste that holds its shape when rolled.
Lemon
Adds bright aroma from the rind and acidity from the juice.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against hazelnut, sugar, almond, 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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