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Dessert

Nut Sandwiches

A sweet sandwich made with chocolate, cream, walnuts, pecans, and buttered bread, rolled in powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and pecans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 634 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Nut Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine grated chocolate and sweet cream until smooth.

  2. Stir in chopped walnuts and pecans until thick.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the mixture between slices of buttered white bread.

  2. Press the sandwiches together and cut into rounds using a biscuit cutter.

  3. Roll the rounds in powdered sugar before serving.

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. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Chocolate + pecanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 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. Chocolate + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,548 recipes

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

  5. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated unsweetened chocolate
Melts into the cream to form the rich, smooth body of the filling.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and fat so the chocolate blends into a spreadable mixture.
Chopped walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, bitter note that contrasts the sweet chocolate.
Chopped pecans
Add extra crunch and buttery flavour to the nut layer.

The step that matters

Stir in the nuts until thick. The chocolate and cream must be fully smooth before the nuts go in; if the chocolate is still grainy or cold, the filling will not thicken evenly and may separate or spread unevenly on the bread.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chocolate, cream, pecans, bread, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chocolate, cream, pecans, bread, 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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