Skip to main content

Candied Chestnuts or Walnuts

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Candied Chestnuts or Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the outer skin or shell from the nuts.

  2. Boil the nuts in water for 1 minute until the skin comes off easily.

  3. Transfer the nuts to another pan of boiling water and cook until tender.

  4. Squeeze the lemon juice into a basin of lukewarm water and add the cooked nuts.

  5. Once cool, dry the nuts and dip each in clarified sugar.

  6. Place the coated nuts on a slab to dry.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + syruptop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Nuts + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Nuts + syruptop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Lemon and sugar 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

Swap the nuts

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes