Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweetmeat Gingerbread-Nuts

A gingerbread dough made with treacle, butter, ginger, preserved citrus, spices, eggs, and flour, baked into pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and coriander match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,498 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweetmeat Gingerbread-Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large basin, combine the treacle.

  2. Melt the butter and pour it into the treacle, stirring well.

  3. Add the pounded ginger, preserved lemon and orange peel, preserved angelica, pounded coriander seed, and whole carraway seeds; mix well.

  4. Break the eggs into the mixture and stir until combined.

  5. Gradually add flour until a fine paste forms.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the mixture into pieces of any size and place them on a tin plate.

  2. Bake in a brisk oven.

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. Lemon + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,498 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Lemon + angelicatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together189 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Treacle
Provides the sweetness, dark colour and sticky moisture that give the gingerbread its character.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as the dough sets.
Flour
Forms the paste and gives the dough its structure.
Pounded ginger
Supplies the warm, spicy aroma that defines gingerbread.

Swap the angelica

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ginger, lemon, orange, coriander, egg, flour):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ginger, lemon, orange, coriander, egg, flour. 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.

More gingerbread recipes

Soft 197Cake 72Nuts 68Molasses 52Pudding 38Cookies 36 See all 364 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes