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To Candy Nuts

A sweet candy coating for nuts made with sugar, water, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Candy Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until the mixture hardens when dropped in cold water.

  3. Remove from heat and add lemon flavoring.

  4. Do not boil after adding lemon.

Coat the nuts

  1. Skewer a nut on a fine knitting needle and dip it into the candy mixture.

  2. Turn the needle until the candy cools and hardens.

  3. If the candy cools too much, warm it on the stove for a few minutes.

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

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

  2. Lemon + nutstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 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

Sugar
Forms the hard candy coating that sets glossy as it cools.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked evenly into syrup.
Nuts
Serve as the core that the hardened candy coats.

The step that matters

Do not boil after adding lemon. Boiling after the flavoring is added keeps cooking the sugar syrup past its target stage, so it can turn darker and harder than intended. Removing it from heat first and stopping there keeps the coating light and brittle.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Nutsthe 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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