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Dessert

Glace Nuts and Fruits

A confection of nuts or fruits glazed in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Glace Nuts and Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a pot and heat until it reaches hard crack stage.

Glaze and cool

  1. Pour the syrup into a deep pan and place it beside a marble slab or table.

  2. Cut larger fruits like cherries and pineapple into squares before dipping.

  3. Dip each piece of nut or fruit into the syrup one at a time using a fork.

  4. Remove and drop the glazed items onto the slab or wax paper 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the hard, glassy coating that sets around each nut or fruit piece as the syrup cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps keep the syrup smooth by discouraging sugar crystals from forming.

The step that matters

Heating the syrup to hard crack stage. Hard crack stage means the sugar is cooked to a very high concentration, so it sets brittle and glassy when cool. Undercooked syrup stays sticky and soft, while overcooked syrup can darken or taste burnt.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

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