Name: Candied Loaf Sugar
Ingredients: 3 pounds loaf sugar; 1 pint water; butter for greasing

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Loaf Sugar

Ingredients

3 pounds loaf sugar
1 pint water
butter for greasing

Directions

Boil the loaf sugar in water until it becomes candied.
Pour the mixture onto pieces of paper that have been greased with butter.
Allow it to cool and harden.

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.

Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 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

Loaf sugar: Forms the sugar structure that sets into a hard candy as the syrup cools.
Water: Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup before candying.

“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.