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Nut Icing

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and walnut work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Nut Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix any quantity of finely chopped nuts into cream icing.

  2. Ice the top of the cake with plain icing.

  3. Lay the halves of walnuts on top.

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. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

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

  3. Cream + walnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nuts, cream):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Brazil nutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nuts, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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