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Dessert

Glace Nuts

A sugar glaze for nuts made by boiling sugar, glucose, and water, then dipping nuts into the hot syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nuts are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,228 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Glace Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 4 lbs sugar, 1 lb glucose, and 1 qt water in a kettle.

  2. Heat the mixture until it boils.

  3. Remove the paddle from the kettle. Cover the kettle and allow the mixture to steam for several minutes.

  4. Remove the cover. Wash the sides of the kettle with a wet brush.

  5. Insert a thermometer into the mixture. Cook the mixture to 300°F (150°C).

Glaze and cool the nuts

  1. Remove the kettle from heat. Dip the bottom of the kettle into a pan of cold water. Set the kettle on a slab.

  2. Drop nuts into the mixture one at a time. Use a fork to fish out the nuts.

  3. Drop the nuts onto a greased surface.

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 + 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 as the syrup cools.
Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallisation, keeping the glaze smooth and clear rather than grainy.
Nuts
Act as the core that the cooked sugar syrup coats and hardens around.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture to 300°F (150°C). At this temperature the syrup has lost enough water to set hard when cooled. Undercooked syrup stays sticky and will not form a crisp glaze, while overcooked syrup can darken and taste bitter.

“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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