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Almond Paste. Pate d’Ama?ides

A sweet almond paste made with almonds, butter, water, egg white, lemon juice, and sifted sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and lemon 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 ↓

Almond Paste. Pate d’Ama?ides

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Blanch and beat the almonds in a mortar, adding a drop of water and a drop of egg white intermittently.

  2. Add a little lemon juice to whiten the mixture.

  3. When smooth, mix in the sifted sugar.

  4. Transfer the mixture to a sweetmeat pan.

  5. Heat on a slow fire, stirring until it no longer sticks to your fingers.

Roll and store

  1. Dust a surface with sifted sugar and roll the paste on it.

  2. Once cold, wrap it in white paper for storage.

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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and flavour of the paste once beaten into a smooth mass.
Sifted sugar
Adds sweetness and helps bind the paste while it is heated and stirred.
Butter
Adds fat, giving the paste a softer, richer texture.
White of egg
Acts as a binder that helps the almond mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Heating until it no longer sticks to your fingers. Heating on a slow fire drives off moisture and lets the sugar and almond solids set into a pliable paste. Stopping too early leaves it sticky; heating too hard risks scorching the sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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