Skip to main content
Dessert

Glace Fruits and Nuts

A hard candy made from sugar syrup with nuts and fruits, cooled on an oiled slab.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pineapple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 377 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Glace Fruits and Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a saucepan.

  2. Cook until it reaches hard crack stage.

  3. Pour the syrup into a deep pan and place it beside a flat slab or another pan.

Glaze and set

  1. One at a time, dip the nuts and fruits into the syrup using a fork.

  2. Remove them and drop onto an oiled slab or pan to cool.

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. Pineapple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Pineapple + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Nuts + pecanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the syrup that hardens into a clear, brittle glaze as it cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent sugar from crystallizing, keeping the glaze smooth.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked into a syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to hard crack stage. Syrup taken too far darkens and turns bitter, while stopping early leaves a sticky coating that never sets hard. Hard crack stage gives a glaze that stays crisp at room temperature.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream, nuts, pineapple, apricot, walnut, pecans):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, nuts, pineapple, apricot, walnut, pecans. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesPineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes