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Dessert

Canary-bird Paste

A stiff paste made from blanched sweet almonds, pea meal, butter, and honey, optionally flavored with saffron and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Canary-bird Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Combine blanched sweet almonds, pea meal, and unsalted butter in a bowl.

  2. Mix in enough honey to form a stiff paste.

Finish

  1. Press the mixture through a colander or large sieve to granulate it.

  2. If desired, add saffron and egg yolks for every 5 pounds of mixture.

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 + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Almond + honeytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + honeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Honey + saffrontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Blanched sweet almonds
Provide the bulk of the paste and a rich, nutty flavour.
Pea meal
Adds body and dry starchy structure to the paste.
Unsalted butter
Adds fat, making the paste soft and smooth in texture.
Honey
Binds the mixture into a stiff paste and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Pressing the mixture through a sieve. Pressing breaks the paste into fine, even granules. If the mixture is left clumpy or unevenly bound, the texture will be uneven and the paste will not crumble or spread consistently.

Swap the saffron

The recipe marks saffron as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, butter, honey, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Saffronthe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, butter, honey, 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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