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Dessert

Fairy Butter

A butter spread made with orange‑flower water, egg yolks, almonds, lemon peel, sugar, and served over wine‑soaked biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Fairy Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Wash the butter in orange‑flower water.

  2. Beat the butter with the pounded yolks of the hard‑boiled eggs.

Make the paste

  1. Blanch and pound the sweet almonds with a little orange‑flower water to a paste.

  2. Add the grated lemon peel and sweeten with pounded loaf sugar.

  3. Mix all ingredients together with a wooden spoon.

  4. Work the mixture through an earthenware colander.

Serve

  1. Soak the Naples biscuits in white wine.

  2. Put the fairy butter over the biscuits in heaps.

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 + biscuittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy body to the mixture.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the butter into a smooth, spreadable mass.
Sweet almonds
Contribute body and a nutty flavour as a fine paste.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the mixture to taste.

The step that matters

Work the mixture through an earthenware colander. Pressing the mixture through a fine sieve breaks up lumps of almond and yolk, giving a smooth, even texture. Skipping this leaves a grainy result.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, almond, lemon, sugar, biscuit, white wine. 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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