Name: Hickory Nut Cones
Ingredients: 1 cup sugar; 1 cup nuts, sliced fine

Why it works: Sugar and nuts are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,228 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Hickory Nut Cones

Ingredients

1 cup sugar
1 cup nuts, sliced fine

Directions

Stir the sugar and sliced nuts together.
Drop 1 teaspoon of the mixture onto buttered tins, 2 inches apart.
Alternatively, roll the mixture and bake like sand tarts.

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.

Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,228 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the cones and helps them spread and caramelize as they bake.
Nuts: Provide the main flavor and body of the cones, with their fat adding richness.

“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.