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Dessert

Cocoa-nut Jumbles

A sweet baked treat made from butter, coconut, eggs, sugar, rose water, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Jumbles

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Peel off the brown skin from the cocoa-nut, wash it, and grate it.

  2. Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy.

Make the dough

  1. Whisk the eggs and add them to the butter and sugar mixture along with the rose-water and grated cocoa-nut.

  2. Stir in enough flour to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough into strips about four inches long, join the ends, and place them on buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + cocoatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a soft crumb.
Grated cocoa-nut
Adds moisture, flavour and chewy texture to the dough.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness as it sets in the oven.
White sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that lets the dough hold its shape when rolled and baked.

The step that matters

Stir in enough flour to form a dough. Too little flour leaves the dough sticky and hard to shape, while too much makes the jumbles dry and tough. Add it gradually until the dough just holds together.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar, rose, flour):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, rose, flour. 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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