Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Hunting Nuts
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare
Steep the pearl ashes in 1 pint of water.
Boil the alum in about the same quantity of water.
Rub the lard into the flour.
Make the dough
Make a well in the flour and add all ingredients except the boiled alum water.
Mix well and then add the boiled alum water to form a stiff dough.
Roll out the dough into strings and cut into small pieces the size of a marble.
Bake
Place the pieces on greased baking sheets with the cut side facing up.
Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Provides the main structure that holds the stiff dough together.
- Treacle
- Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark colour to the biscuits.
- Moist sugar
- Adds sweetness and moisture, helping the biscuits brown as they bake.
- Lard
- Adds fat, which makes the biscuits short and tender.
- Pearl ashes
- An alkaline salt that darkens the dough and reacts with the alum.
- Alum
- An acidic salt that reacts with the pearl ashes to release gas and lighten the biscuits.
The step that matters
Adding the boiled alum water. Alum and pearl ashes react to release gas, so the alum water should be added only after the other ingredients are well mixed, and the dough shaped promptly to keep that gas in the dough while it bakes.
“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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