Skip to main content
Dessert

Walnut Sundae

A dessert of chopped walnuts and pecans mixed with powdered sugar and maple syrup, served over plain ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Walnut and pecans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 634 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Walnut Sundae

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the topping

  1. Chop the English walnuts and pecans together.

  2. Mix in the powdered sugar.

  3. Add enough maple syrup to suit your taste.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over plain ice cream.

  2. Serve in glasses.

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. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Pecans + maple syruptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Walnut + maple syruptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Sugar + maple syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,252 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

English walnuts
Provide crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor to the topping.
Pecans
Add crunch and a buttery, sweet nuttiness to the topping.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily to sweeten the topping and give it a smooth texture.
Maple syrup
Adds liquid sweetness and maple aroma to bind the topping.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Cashew nutfits about as well
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pecans, sugar, maple syrup, 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.

You might also like

Maple FudgeMaple Fudge35 recipesMaple CreamMaple Cream34 recipesMaple Syrup FillingMaple Syrup Filling12 recipesMaple Cream CandyMaple Cream Candy11 recipes