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Walnut Cream

A sweet candy made by boiling sugar and cream, adding walnuts, and letting the mixture harden on buttered plates.

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 ↓

Walnut Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar and cream until it becomes brittle in cold water.

  2. Add the nuts and stir well.

  3. Pour the mixture onto buttered plates to harden.

  4. Ensure it is boiled enough to harden properly.

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. Coffee + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, when boiled, sets into a hard, brittle candy as it cools.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the sugar mixture's texture before it hardens.
Walnuts
Add crunch and nutty flavor to the candy.

The step that matters

Boiling until brittle. Hard candy sets only when the sugar syrup is cooked long enough that little water remains. Undercooked syrup stays soft or sticky and will not harden properly as it cools.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Hazelnutfits better
  2. Cocoafits better
  3. Nutsthe original
  4. Almondfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, 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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