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Dessert

Ratafias

A sweet almond confection made with ground almonds, sugar, rice flour, and egg whites, baked into small pastries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Ratafias

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mixture

  1. Mix the flour and almonds with the sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add the egg whites and stir with a wooden spoon until it forms a paste.

Pipe and bake

  1. Fill a piping bag with a plain tip about ½ inch in diameter.

  2. Pipe the mixture onto baking sheets lined with smooth white paper.

  3. Dust with fine sugar.

  4. Bake in a cool oven (300°F / 150°C).

  5. Remove the paper after baking.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + flourtop 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. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Ground sweet almonds
Provide the main nutty body and bulk of the almond paste.
Ground bitter almonds
Add a stronger, more aromatic almond flavour to the tarts.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps it hold moisture for a tender bake.
Fine rice flour
Adds a little structure so the piped shapes hold their form.
Egg whites
Bind the almonds and sugar into a paste and help set the tarts as they bake.

The step that matters

Stir the egg whites into a paste. The paste needs to be smooth and evenly bound before piping. Overmixing can knock air out of the whites and make the tarts spread or bake dense, while undermixing leaves streaks of dry almond and sugar.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Cashew nutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rice, flour, egg. 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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