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Dessert

Candied Nuts

Candied nuts are nuts coated in a sugar glaze made by boiling sugar with cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and cream of tartar in a saucepan until it reaches 300°F (150°C).

  2. Remove the pan from heat.

Coat and set

  1. Drop a few nuts into the sugar mixture.

  2. Lift the nuts out with a long fork.

  3. Place the nuts on a baking sheet or a cold iron plate until set.

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

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

  2. Filbert + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77 recipes

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

  3. Filbert + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the hard, glassy candy coating around the nuts as it cools.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps keep the sugar syrup smooth and prevents crystallization.
Nut kernels
Provide the crunchy, flavorful centre that the candy coating surrounds.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to 300°F (150°C). At this temperature the sugar reaches the hard-crack stage, so the coating sets hard and crisp when cooled. Too low and the coating stays sticky; too high and it turns bitter or burns.

Swap the filbert

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Filbertthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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