Why it works: Filbert and hazelnut work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Nuts
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare and layer
Remove the husks from perfectly ripe filberts and dry them by rubbing with a coarse cloth.
Sprinkle a little salt at the bottom of a clean, dry stone jar.
Layer the filberts in the jar, adding a small amount of salt between each layer.
Store
Secure the jar to keep out air and store it in a dry place.
After six months, the nuts will be ready to peel.
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.
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Filbert + hazelnuttop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together21 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Filberts
- The main food being preserved; its nut meat changes slowly during the long dry storage.
The step that matters
Drying the filberts before layering. Any surface moisture left on the nuts can encourage mould and spoilage during storage, and salt draws moisture out, so the nuts must be dry before they go into the jar.
“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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