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Gros Nougat, Formant Melon a LA Fnmaise

A nougat shaped like a melon made from pistachios, almonds, and caramelized sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Gros Nougat, Formant Melon a LA Fnmaise

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Oil and wipe a large melon-shaped mold.

  2. Dry 8 ounces of pistachios in the oven and cut each into five equal parts.

  3. Skin 5 pounds of sweet almonds, cut each into two, then into five equal fillets, and dry in a slow oven until they begin to color.

  4. Weigh 1.5 pounds of the dried almonds and return them to the oven.

Make the caramel and mix

  1. Melt 12 ounces of sifted sugar in a caramel pan over gentle heat, stirring only at the boiling point until fully melted and red in color.

  2. Immediately add the hot almonds to the caramel and stir lightly.

Shape

  1. Pour one-third of the mixture onto a warm baking sheet and set the remainder at the mouth of the oven.

  2. On a dish, place half of the chopped pistachios and the sugar grains.

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. Pistachio + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Pistachio + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Form the bulk of the nougat and give it a firm, chewy body.
Sugar
Melts into a caramel that binds the nuts and sets as the candy cools.
Pistachios
Add color, flavor and crunch to the finished nougat.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar to caramel. Sugar burns quickly once it passes the boiling point. Stirring only at that point and watching for a red color keeps the caramel from turning bitter or scorched before the hot almonds are added.

“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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