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Dessert

Walnut Bars

A baked bar made with butter, sugar, chocolate, eggs, flour, walnuts, vanilla, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,020 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Walnut Bars

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar and cream together until smooth.

  3. Melt the chocolate and mix it in.

  4. Add the well-beaten eggs and stir until combined.

  5. Sift in the flour and salt, then add the walnuts and vanilla.

Bake and serve

  1. Spread the mixture in a buttered shallow pan, about ¾ inch thick.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. Cut into squares while hot and remove from the pan to a cooling rack.

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. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Vanilla + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,730 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Chocolate + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the bars a tender, rich body.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the bars as they bake.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the bars together.
Chocolate
Adds richness and deep flavour throughout the bars.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a nutty texture to the batter.

The step that matters

Cut into squares while hot. The bars are still soft when hot and may crumble or stick if cut too early; cutting while hot is the instruction given, so the cook should keep the bars in the pan until they are ready to cut and remove.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, chocolate, vanilla, flour, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, chocolate, vanilla, flour, egg. 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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