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Dessert

Frosted Walnuts

Walnuts coated in sugar and egg white, baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Frosted Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Remove the shells from the walnuts.

  2. Take off the skins and separate them into halves.

Frost and bake

  1. Dip the halves into icing made from sugar and beaten egg white.

  2. Place them on a clean sheet of paper.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until light brown.

  4. Remove from the paper and serve.

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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Walnut + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Walnut + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main nutty body and bulk of the confection.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps it dry to a crisp, light coating.
Egg white
Binds the sugar into a thin icing that sets to a crisp coating when baked.

The step that matters

Baking until light brown. Egg white and sugar set and dry in the oven, and sugar browns quickly at high heat. Pulling the walnuts out once they are light brown avoids scorching the sugar, which would turn bitter.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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