Name: Marzipan Potatoes
Ingredients: 1 lb icing sugar; ½ lb ground almonds; Whites of 2 eggs; Cinnamon for dusting

Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Marzipan Potatoes

Ingredients

1 lb icing sugar
½ lb ground almonds
Whites of 2 eggs
Cinnamon for dusting

Directions

Mix icing sugar, ground almonds, and egg whites into a smooth paste.
Form the mixture into round pieces using your hands.
Dust the formed pieces with cinnamon.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,514 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,679 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Almond + eggtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Icing sugar: Sweetens the paste and adds bulk, giving it a firm, moldable body.
Ground almonds: Provides the almond flavour and the dense, smooth texture typical of marzipan.
Egg whites: Bind the sugar and almonds into a cohesive paste that holds its shape.

“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.