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Dessert

Cream Walnuts

A sweet walnut cake made by boiling sugar in water, then cooling and molding with walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,147 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Pour 2-3 cups of boiling water over the mixture and let it stand for 10 minutes.

  2. Set the mixture on the stove and stir until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Let it boil for 4 minutes without stirring, or until it forms a soft ball when dropped in cold water.

Shape and finish

  1. Remove from the stove and beat until cool enough to mold by hand.

  2. Mold into shape and place walnuts on either side.

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 + walnuttop 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

Sugar
Dissolves and cooks into a syrup that sets as the mixture cools and firms.
Walnuts
Add crunch and nutty flavour to the finished shaped cake.

The step that matters

Boiling without stirring. Once the sugar dissolves, stirring can trigger crystallisation and make the mixture grainy. Boiling it undisturbed lets the syrup reach the soft-ball stage, which determines whether it sets soft and moldable rather than hard or sandy.

“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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