Name: Nut Creams
Ingredients: almonds; hickory nuts; butternuts; English walnuts; French Cream; sugar

Why it works: Almond and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Nut Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the almonds, hickory nuts, butternuts, or English walnuts finely.
Prepare the French Cream and stir in the chopped nuts before adding all the sugar.
Form the mixture into balls, bars, or squares.
You can mix several kinds of nuts together.

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.

Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together993 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Almond + butternuttop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butternut + walnuttop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together15 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Almond + nutstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together394 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Swap the nuts

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

Pistachiofits better
Brazil nutfits better
Cashew nutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, butternut, walnut, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.