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Dessert

Nut Creams

A confection of finely chopped nuts mixed with French cream, formed into shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and walnut 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 ↓

Nut Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Prepare the French Cream according to your recipe.

Shape

  1. While the cream is still soft, stir in the chopped nuts.

  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 + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butternut + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

French cream
Forms the soft base that binds the chopped nuts together.
Almonds
Add crunch and nutty flavour to the creams.
Hickory nuts
Add crunch and a strong, rich nutty flavour.
Butternuts
Add crunch and a rich, oily nutty flavour.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a slightly bitter, earthy nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the nuts while the cream is still soft. Once the cream firms up, the chopped nuts will not blend evenly and the mixture becomes hard to shape. Working while it is soft keeps the texture uniform and the pieces well distributed.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, butternut, walnut, 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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