Why it works: Walnut and brandy work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓
Walnut Water
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Bruise the walnuts well in a large mortar.
Put the bruised walnuts and halm into a pan.
Add the brandy and cover the pan tightly.
Let it sit for three days.
Distill
Distill the mixture in a cold still.
From this quantity, draw off three quarts.
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.
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Walnut + brandytop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together239 recipes
Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Fine green walnuts
- Provide the main flavour and aromatic oils for the distilled water.
- French brandy
- Acts as the solvent that draws flavour out of the walnuts during steeping.
- Halm
- Adds a herbal aroma to the infusion.
The step that matters
Cover the pan tightly. A tight cover keeps alcohol and volatile aromatic compounds from escaping during the three-day steep, so the flavour stays in the liquid for distilling.
“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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