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Dessert

Nut Creams

A mixture of chopped nuts and French cream formed into balls, bars, or squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butternut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nut Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the almonds, hickory nuts, butternuts, or English walnuts finely.

  2. You can mix several kinds of nuts together.

Make and shape

  1. Prepare the French Cream and stir in the nuts while the cream is still soft.

  2. Form the mixture into balls, bars, or squares.

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. Almond + butternuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Almond + nutstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Nuts + butternuttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Add crunch and a rich, nutty flavor to the creams.
Hickory nuts
Add crunch and a distinct nutty flavor to the creams.
Butternuts or english walnuts
Add crunch and a distinct nutty flavor to the creams.
French cream
Binds the chopped nuts together and gives the shaped pieces a soft, creamy body.

The step that matters

Stir in the nuts while the cream is still soft. Once the cream firms up it can no longer be mixed evenly, and the nuts will clump or fail to stay bound. Working while it is soft lets the nuts distribute evenly so the shaped pieces hold together.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, butternut, cream, sugar. 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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