Name: Cinnamon Crumbs
Ingredients: 2 cups pastry flour; 1 cup sugar; 1 teaspoon cinnamon; Butter (to make it soft); Optional: lard (to use with butter); 1 cup blanched almonds (chopped fine); ½ cup sugar (for almonds)

Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Cinnamon Crumbs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crumbs

In a bowl, mix the pastry flour, sugar, and cinnamon.
Add enough butter to make the mixture soft and workable.
Use your fingers to incorporate the butter until it resembles crumbs or small balls.

Add the topping

For the topping, mix the chopped almonds with ½ cup sugar.
Spread the almond mixture on top of the cinnamon crumbs.

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.

Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,514 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,673 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Pastry flour: Provides the bulk and structure of the crumb mixture.
Butter: Binds the dry ingredients into soft, workable crumbs and adds richness.
Blanched almonds: Add nutty texture and body to the topping.

“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.