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Candied Peppermint

A sugar candy flavored with peppermint oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and peppermint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,082 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Peppermint

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil the sugar in water until it begins to candy around the sides of the pan.

  2. Remove the pan from the heat and add the oil of peppermint.

Shape and cut

  1. Pour the mixture into small round tin hoops or onto a buttered piece of paper.

  2. Place a square frame on the paper and pour the sugar mixture inside.

  3. Once cooled, cut the candy into desired shapes with a knife.

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. Sugar + pepperminttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,082 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw sugar
Forms the candy's structure and sweetness as it cooks and sets once cooled.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup that candies at the pan's edges.
Oil of peppermint
Provides the peppermint aroma and flavour added off the heat.

The step that matters

Removing the pan from the heat before adding the oil of peppermint. Boiling sugar syrup gets very hot, and volatile aromatic oils like peppermint lose much of their scent when exposed to high heat, so adding them off the heat preserves the flavour.

“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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