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Imitation of Celery in Sugar

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and saffron work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 650 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Imitation of Celery in Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Add enough saffron to give the sugar a straw-colored tinge.

  3. Work the sugar on a slab, then with your hands until it is less elastic but not brittle.

  4. Pull the sugar to form the stems of the celery, with an assistant pressing the thick ends together.

  5. Join eight or nine stems to form a head of celery, measuring 12 to 18 inches long.

  6. Tie a string around the root and suspend it to cool and stiffen.

  7. Fasten the root end with caramel sugar on a 6-inch diameter disc of baked confectioner's paste or thick pasteboard for stability.

  8. Garnish the base with rout cakes made to resemble vegetables.

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.

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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. Sugar + saffrontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together650 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