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Dessert

Preserved Walnuts

Walnuts preserved in a sugar syrup by layering with sugar and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,147 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and layer

  1. Pick walnuts when they can be punctured with a pin and no shell is visible.

  2. In a jar, layer ½ inch of coarse sugar, then a layer of wiped walnuts, ensuring they are all sound.

  3. Continue layering sugar and walnuts until the jar is nearly full.

  4. Use ½ pound of sugar for every 20 walnuts.

Cook and store

  1. Cover the jar with coarse paper and place it in a saucepan of boiling water for 3 hours.

  2. Ensure the syrup covers the walnuts; if not, add more sugar and simmer.

  3. Once cooled, cover the jar with bladder and do not disturb for 6 months.

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. Walnut + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,147 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
The main fruit, preserved whole in a sugar syrup.
Coarse sugar
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and forms a syrup that preserves them.

The step that matters

Ensure the syrup covers the walnuts. Walnuts exposed above the syrup can spoil, because sugar only preserves them when fully surrounded by dense syrup. Adding sugar and simmering dissolves more into the liquid to cover them.

“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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