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Hickory Nut Candy

A candied confection made with hickory nuts, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,866 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Hickory Nut Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water together without stirring until thick enough to spin a thread.

  2. Add flavoring if desired.

  3. Set the mixture in cold water.

Finish and set

  1. Stir quickly until the mixture turns white.

  2. Add the hickory nuts.

  3. Pour into a flat tin.

  4. Cut into squares.

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. Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the candy base and provides sweetness when boiled to a thick syrup.
Hickory nut meats
Add crunch and a nutty flavor to the set candy.

The step that matters

Stir quickly until the mixture turns white. Stirring the cooled syrup encourages fine sugar crystals to form, making the candy opaque and creamy. If it is stirred too long or left too long, it sets too hard to pour and can turn grainy.

“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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