Name: Almond Rocks
Ingredients: 1 pound sweet almonds; 2 pounds loaf sugar; 1.5 pounds sweet almonds, sliced

Why it works: Almond and sugar 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 ↓

Almond Rocks

Ingredients

1 pound sweet almonds
2 pounds loaf sugar
1.5 pounds sweet almonds, sliced

Directions

Prepare

Chop 1 pound of sweet almonds finely.
Mix the chopped almonds with 2 pounds of loaf sugar.
Add 1.5 pounds of sliced sweet almonds to the mixture.

Shape and store

Shape the mixture into rocks and let them dry.
Store in an airtight container.

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.

Almond + sugartop 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

Sweet almonds: Provide the main body and nutty flavor of the rocks.
Loaf sugar: Adds sweetness and binds the almonds into a firm mass as it dries.

“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.