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Brazil Fritters

Brazil nut fritters made by cooking glucose, sugar, grease, and water, then adding nuts, salt, and lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Brazil nut and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brazil Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine glucose, sugar, grease, and water in a copper kettle.

  2. Heat the mixture on a furnace, stirring with a paddle.

  3. When it starts to boil, insert a thermometer.

  4. Once the thermometer reads 300°F (150°C), remove it.

Add the nuts

  1. Add Brazil nuts, salt, and lemon extract, and mix well.

Shape

  1. Dump the mixture onto a well-greased slab.

  2. Manipulate the mixture as you would for pecan fritters.

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. Brazil nut + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together44 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + brazil nuttop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Brazil nuts
Make up the bulk of the fritters and provide the main nutty flavor and crunchy texture.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, once cooked, builds the firm body of the candy coating.
Glucose
Interferes with sugar crystallization, keeping the syrup smooth rather than grainy.
Grease
Adds fat that softens the set candy and helps it release from the slab.

The step that matters

Stop cooking the syrup at 300°F (150°C). Cooking drives off water and concentrates the sugars. The final temperature sets how hard the mixture becomes as it cools, so removing it too early or too late changes the texture of the fritters.

Swap the brazil nut

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Brazil nutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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