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Dessert

Caramelled Nuts

A sweet treat of nuts coated in caramelized sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Caramelled Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sugar

  1. Boil the sugar in a saucepan until it drops hard in water.

  2. Add a few drops of lemon juice.

  3. Blanch the almonds and dry them well.

Coat the nuts

  1. Drop each nut into the sugar one at a time, turning it until well covered without stirring the sugar.

  2. Lift the nut out with a fork or spoon, ensuring not to drain it, so a clear ring of candy forms around each nut.

  3. Warm the nuts to prevent chilling the candy and work quickly.

  4. If the sugar hardens before finishing, return it to the heat, adding a teaspoon of water if necessary, and boil it to the right degree again.

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. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Granulated sugar
Forms the hard candy coating that gives the nuts their glossy, brittle shell.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that helps keep the sugar from crystallizing.
Almonds
Provide the crunchy nut centre that the candy coats.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the right degree. The sugar must reach the hard-crack stage, where it drops hard in water. Undercooked sugar stays sticky and soft, while overcooked sugar turns bitter and dark. Keeping the sugar at the right stage is what makes the coating set crisp.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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