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Dessert

Grilled Pecans

A sweet glaze of sugar and water coats blanched pecans, then cooled on wax paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pecans and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,962 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Grilled Pecans

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the pecans.

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Add the pecans and let them soak for 10 minutes.

Coat and cool

  1. Remove from heat and stir until the mixture thickens and clings to the nuts.

  2. Spread the nuts on 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. Pecans + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,962 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pecans
Form the main body of the candy, carrying the coating and giving a crunchy bite.
Sugar
Dissolves in water to form a syrup that sweetens and hardens into a glossy coating on the nuts.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and stir until the mixture thickens. Sugar syrup keeps thickening and can turn grainy or crystallize if it is overcooked or stirred too long. Stirring off the heat lets it thicken gradually into a coating that clings to the nuts instead of hardening into a brittle sheet.

“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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