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Dessert

Walnuts, Wet

Walnuts are boiled, soaked, and coated in a sweet syrup, then dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Walnuts, Wet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Peel the green rind from the walnuts and place them in cold water.

  2. Boil a pan of water and add the walnuts with a little pulverized alum.

  3. Blanch the walnuts until a pin can easily pass through them.

  4. Remove the walnuts and place them in cold water until cool.

  5. Drain the walnuts and place them in an earthen pan.

Make the syrup and steep

  1. Clarify double-refined sugar and boil it to a little thread, then let it cool.

  2. Pour the cooled syrup over the walnuts and drain the syrup for five days, heating it each day without boiling.

  3. Each day, add fresh syrup to replace what the walnuts absorb.

  4. On the fifth day, boil the sugar to a great pearl and pour it over the walnuts again, then cover the pan until ready to dry and use.

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

Large green walnuts
Provide the main body of the confection, which absorbs the sugar syrup over several days.
Pulverized alum
Firms the walnut flesh during blanching so it holds its shape in the syrup.
Double-refined sugar
Makes the syrup that preserves the walnuts and gives them sweetness.

The step that matters

Blanching the walnuts until a pin can pass through. Blanching softens the walnuts enough for syrup to penetrate, but overcooking breaks down their structure. Testing with a pin shows when they are tender yet still intact.

“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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