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Dessert

Molasses Candy

Molasses candy is a sweet confection made from molasses, brown sugar, lemon juice, and optional nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and almond work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 394 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Molasses Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Mix molasses and brown sugar in a large pot.

  2. Boil the mixture over moderate heat for 2.5 hours, stirring frequently.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and optional grated lemon rind after 2.5 hours.

  4. If using nuts, stir them in a few minutes before removing from heat.

Shape the candy

  1. Butter a square tin pan.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pan to cool.

  3. Pull the warm candy into a thick string using your hands to make it yellow.

  4. Roll the candy into sticks.

  5. Twist two sticks together.

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 + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

West india molasses
Provides the dark color, deep flavor and chewy body of the candy.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the candy set firm as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the molasses and sugar.

The step that matters

Pulling the warm candy. Candy must be warm enough to stretch but not so hot it burns the hands or so cool it cracks. Pulling air into the mass as it cools makes it lighter and more opaque in color.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, sugar, nuts, almond):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, sugar, nuts, almond. 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 molasses candy recipes

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