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Dessert

Caramel Walnuts

A sweet treat of walnuts coated in a caramelized sugar glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Caramel Walnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Remove the walnuts from their shells, keeping the kernels as whole as possible.

Make the caramels

  1. Sift the icing sugar.

  2. Pound the sifted icing sugar with the ground almonds and egg white.

  3. If the mixture is moist, add more sugar to make it dry and almost hard.

  4. Roll a piece of the mixture into a ball.

  5. Firmly press half a walnut on each side of the ball.

  6. Repeat until all the mixture is used.

  7. Set the caramels aside for 24 hours to harden.

Coat and set

  1. Boil the granulated sugar, water, and cream of tartar together until thick.

  2. Dip the walnuts in the syrup.

  3. Place the dipped walnuts on a buttered plate until cold.

  4. To remove the walnuts, heat the plate slightly.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

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

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Form the main body and visible shell of each caramel.
Icing sugar
Provides bulk and sweetness, forming the firm paste that holds the walnut halves.
Ground almonds
Add body and a nutty flavour to the paste.
Egg white
Binds the sugar and almonds into a cohesive paste.
Granulated sugar
Forms the thick syrup that coats the walnuts and sets into a glossy shell.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until thick. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set firm and glossy when cool. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns brittle and can darken.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar, egg, 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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