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Dessert

Nut Bars

Nut Bars are a baked or fried dough with flour, nuts, sugar, butter, baking powder, milk, egg, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Nut Bars

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder into a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter and add the nuts and sugar.

  3. Mix to a rather stiff dough with the egg and milk.

Shape and cook

  1. Turn onto a floured board and roll out to ⅔ inch thick.

  2. Cut into bars of convenient size.

  3. Fry in hot fat until golden brown.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the bars together.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add tenderness and richness.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the bars rise and become light.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds structure as it sets.
Nuts
Add crunch, flavour and texture to the bars.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Fry in hot fat until golden brown. If the fat is not hot enough, the bars soak up oil and turn greasy before the outside browns and the inside cooks through. Hot fat seals the surface quickly for a crisp, golden result.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, milk, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, milk, egg. 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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