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Dessert

Almond Tablets

A confection made from boiled sugar, glucose, water, almonds, and lemon flavoring, formed into tablets.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the sugar

  1. Boil the brown sugar, glucose, and water until it reaches the hard crack stage.

  2. Pour the mixture onto an oiled plate.

Add almonds and shape

  1. Sprinkle the chopped almonds and a few drops of lemon flavoring over the mixture.

  2. Knead the mixture until it becomes stiff.

  3. Cut into small pieces.

  4. Pass the pieces through a tablet roller.

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. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Brown sugar
Provides the main sweetness and the bulk of the candy's body.
Glucose
Helps prevent sugar crystals from forming, keeping the tablets smooth rather than grainy.
Almonds
Add crunch and texture that contrast with the firm sugar mass.

The step that matters

Boiling to the hard crack stage. At this point the sugar has cooked down to very little water, so it sets hard and brittle when cooled. Stopping early leaves the tablets soft and sticky, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar and make it bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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