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Dessert

Passover Rock Cakes

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, currants, lemon rind, eggs, meal, and ground almonds, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Passover Rock Cakes

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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter, sugar, currants, and chopped lemon rind.

  2. Add the ground almonds and sieved meal to the mixture.

  3. Beat the eggs and incorporate them into the mixture until it forms a thick paste.

  4. If the mixture is not thick enough, add more meal.

Shape and bake

  1. Break the mixture into pieces and place them on a baking tray.

  2. Chop a few almonds and stick pieces into each rock before 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. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture into a thick paste and help the rocks hold their shape.
Sieved meal
Provides the structure that firms up the paste.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps them brown in the oven.
Ground almonds
Add body, nutty flavour and moisture to the mixture.

The step that matters

Adding more meal only if the mixture is too soft. Too much meal makes the rocks dry and dense, while too little leaves them spreading and shapeless. Judge the paste by its thickness before adding more, so the rocks bake up firm but still tender.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, lemon, egg, almond. 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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