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Dessert

English Walnut and Pecan-nut Candy

A candy of halved walnuts and pecans coated with boiled sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and nuts work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

English Walnut and Pecan-nut Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil the sugar in a saucepan until it reaches the hard ball stage.

Assemble and set

  1. Crack the nuts and place them in halves on buttered baking sheets.

  2. Pour the hot boiled sugar over each nut half using a large teaspoon.

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 + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Boiled to the hard ball stage, it hardens as it cools, forming the brittle candy coating.
English walnuts
Provide the main nut flavour and crunchy texture within the candy.
Pecan nuts
Add a buttery, rich nut flavour and crunchy texture within the candy.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot boiled sugar. Sugar cooked to the hard ball stage is very hot and sets quickly, so it must be poured promptly over each nut half to form neat, evenly coated pieces before it hardens.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, walnut, 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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