Skip to main content
Dessert

Wellesley Sea Foam

A maple sugar and walnut dessert made by whipping egg whites into a foam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coffee and walnut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 289 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Wellesley Sea Foam

Ingredients

Directions

Make the foam

  1. Boil maple sugar and water until it forms a soft ball in cold water.

  2. Gradually pour the syrup onto the beaten egg whites while beating quickly with an egg beater until it reaches the consistency of whipped cream.

  3. Fold in the broken walnut meats.

Shape

  1. Drop spoonfuls onto a buttered plate.

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. Coffee + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Maple sugar
Dissolves into the boiled syrup that gives the candy its sweetness and firm set.
Egg whites
Whipped with the syrup to trap air, giving the foam its light, airy structure.
Walnut meats
Add crunch and nutty flavour that contrast with the soft, airy texture.

The step that matters

Beating the syrup into the egg whites. Pouring the syrup in slowly while beating keeps it from deflating the whites, so the mixture reaches a whipped-cream consistency and holds its shape when dropped.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Cocoafits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Almondfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, coffee, meat, 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.

More sea foam recipes

Candy 17 See all 10 →

You might also like

Coffee Ice CreamCoffee Ice Cream91 recipesCoffee CustardCoffee Custard27 recipesCoffee CakeCoffee Cake21 recipesCoffee Bavarian CreamCoffee Bavarian Cream14 recipes