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Dessert

Nut Bars

A simple sweet treat made from melted fondant, nuts, and vanilla, poured into a pan, cooled, cut into bars, and wrapped.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and vanilla work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Nut Bars

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bars

  1. Melt the fondant in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped nuts and vanilla, stirring to combine.

  3. Pour the mixture into a small, buttered pan to a thickness of about ½ inch.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

Cut and wrap

  1. Cut the cooled mixture into bars.

  2. Wrap each bar in waxed paper.

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. Nuts + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 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

Fondant
Melts to form the sweet, sticky base that holds the bars together.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and texture to the set mixture.

“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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