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Filbert Rout-cakes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 352 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Filbert Rout-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the paste as in the previous recipe and roll it out with sifted sugar to 1/8 inch thickness.

  2. Use a tin cutter to stamp out leaves resembling the hulls of filberts.

  3. Take a large almond or filbert kernel and surround its bottom with four leaves, pinching them together to form a stem.

  4. Cluster two to four of these filberts together and place them upright on a baking sheet that has been very lightly waxed.

  5. Allow the cakes to dry in a cool place until the next day.

  6. Bake the filberts in a low heat until completely dry, without adding color.

  7. Prepare royal icing with one egg white; color two-thirds with spinach green and the rest with dissolved chocolate for light nut-brown.

  8. Paint the kernels with brown icing and the leaves, especially the tips, with green icing, ensuring the green is delicate.

  9. Dry the filberts in a cool place for a few minutes to avoid damaging the icing color.

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 + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together352 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Almond + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,733 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond, egg, chocolate. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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