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Another Store-flavouring for Puddings or Cakes

A powdered lemon and bitter almond paste used as a flavouring for puddings or cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Another Store-flavouring for Puddings or Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the rinds of 2 large lemons.

  2. Powder the sugar and gradually mix it with 1 ounce of blanched, dry bitter almonds.

  3. Pound the mixture into a fine paste until well blended.

Store

  1. Press the mixture into a small pan and cover it with paper.

  2. Store for later use.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. 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

Sugar
Sweetens the flavouring and helps bind it into a dry paste when pounded.
Lemon rinds
Supply aromatic oils that give the flavouring its citrus fragrance.
Bitter almonds
Provide a strong, nutty aroma that flavours puddings or cakes.

The step that matters

Pound the mixture into a fine paste. If the almonds and sugar are not pounded finely and evenly, the flavouring will be gritty and the flavour will not blend. Thorough pounding releases the aromatic oils and spreads them through the sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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