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Conserve Icings

A nut confection made by cooking a conserve mixture with egg whites and hickory nuts, then cutting it into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and cream work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 886 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Conserve Icings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Cook a batch as for Conserve Bonbons.

  2. Whip the egg whites into the mixture.

  3. Stir in the nuts when done.

Set and finish

  1. Pour into a tray lined with CREAM GOODS. 81 paper.

  2. Once cold, cut into squares and crystallize.

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. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Egg + nutstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,624 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture to add foam, lightness and a softer texture.
Hickory nuts
Add crunch and a rich, nutty flavour to the finished squares.

The step that matters

Cut only once the mixture is cold. While still warm the mixture is soft and will not hold clean edges. Once it cools and firms, the sugar sets, so squares cut cleanly and keep their shape.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream. 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.