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Dessert

Nut Bars

A sweet treat made by melting fondant, mixing nuts and vanilla, then setting in a pan and cutting into bars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ½ inch.

Cut and wrap

  1. Once cool, cut into bars and wrap 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).

  2. Vanilla + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Nuts + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

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

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, binding base that holds the bars together.
Chopped nuts
Add texture and crunch to the soft fondant base.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cocoafits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vanilla, butter. 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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