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Dessert

Candied Nuts

Candied nuts are nuts coated in a sugar syrup cooked to 300°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Brazil nut and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Candied Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil sugar, water, and cream of tartar until it reaches 300°F (150°C).

Coat and set the nuts

  1. Remove from heat and drop in shelled nuts, half a dozen at a time.

  2. Lift them out with a fork and place on tins until cold.

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. Brazil nut + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together68 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Brazil nut + walnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the crisp, hard candy coating that hardens as the syrup cools.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps prevent the sugar syrup from crystallising.
Brazil nuts
Nut core that is coated and held inside the crisp sugar shell.
Almonds
Nut core that is coated and held inside the crisp sugar shell.
English walnuts
Nut core that is coated and held inside the crisp sugar shell.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup to 300°F (150°C). At this temperature the sugar reaches the hard-crack stage, so the coating sets hard and crisp when cool. Lower temperatures leave a sticky, soft coating that does not hold, while overheating can scorch or darken the sugar.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, brazil nut, almond. 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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