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Dessert

Macaroons

A sweet almond-based confection made with almond paste, egg whites, sugar, and orange-flour water, baked into small cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Macaroons

Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Macaroons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds with the orange-flour water.

Make the paste

  1. Whisk the egg whites to a froth.

  2. Mix the egg whites and sifted sugar with the almond mixture to form a paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Lay a sheet of wafer paper on a tin.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto the wafer paper to form small cakes.

  3. Bake until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Almonds
Form the bulk of the paste, giving the macaroons their body and nutty flavor.
Egg whites
Whisked to a foam, they add structure and lightness to the paste and help it set.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps bind the paste into a smooth, workable texture.

The step that matters

Whisk the egg whites to a froth. Egg whites hold air when whisked into a stable foam. Underwhipped whites give a dense, flat cake, while overwhipped whites turn grainy and collapse when folded into the paste.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, flour, egg, sugar. 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 macaroons recipes

Almond 89Coconut 62Chocolate 43Oatmeal 33Hickory Nut 16Peanut 11 See all 48 →

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