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Dessert

Frosted Walnuts

Frosted walnuts are walnut halves coated in sugar and egg white, baked until light brown.

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 walnut halves into icing made from sugar and beaten egg white.

  2. Place them on a sheet of clean paper.

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

Serve

  1. 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
Form the rich, crunchy nut centre that the sugar coating surrounds.
Sugar
Makes the icing sweet and helps it dry to a crisp, light brown coating.
Egg white
Binds the sugar into a thin icing that clings to the walnut halves and sets when baked.

The step that matters

Bake until light brown. Sugar darkens quickly in the oven, so the coating can scorch or turn bitter if left too long. Checking the colour often keeps it golden and crisp.

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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