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Dessert

Glace Nuts

A candied nut confection made by boiling sugar, water, and cream of tartar, then coating nuts and letting them harden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Glace Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a saucepan; stir until dissolved.

  2. Boil the mixture until it becomes clear and brittle when dropped in cold water.

Coat and harden the nuts

  1. Place the saucepan in hot water.

  2. Drop nuts in one at a time, then remove immediately.

  3. Place the coated nuts on oiled paper to harden.

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. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the crisp, brittle candy coating around the nuts as the syrup cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing, keeping the coating smooth.
Nuts
Provide the core that the hardened sugar coating surrounds.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to the brittle stage. The syrup must reach the point where it turns clear and hardens in cold water. Stopping early leaves a sticky coating that will not set firm, while overcooking can make it bitter or too hard to coat the nuts.

Swap the nuts

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

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