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Dessert

Crystal Nuts

A confection of nuts coated in a sugar syrup that hardens into a crystal-like shell.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and nuts work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Crystal Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the mixture forms a string when dropped from a spoon.

Coat the nuts

  1. Remove from heat and add the nut meats.

  2. Beat the mixture well until the nuts are coated.

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. Meat + nutstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 recipes

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

  2. Nuts + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

  3. Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Nut meats
The main ingredient, which becomes coated in the crystallized sugar shell.
Sugar
Cooked into syrup that recrystallizes as it cools and beats, forming a crisp, sweet coating.

The step that matters

Cook the syrup to a string stage. Cooking the sugar syrup to the string stage gives it enough concentration to set into a crisp coating. Syrup cooked too little stays sticky, and beating it while it cools encourages the sugar to crystallize around the nuts.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sugar. 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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