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Celery Comfits

Celery confections made from celery seeds and white syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and syrup work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 63 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Celery Comfits

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Warm a pan over a chafing dish and add the celery seeds.

  2. Pour white syrup over the seeds and work them with your hands.

Dry and build the coating

  1. Once they are large enough, place them in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 24 to 48 hours to dry completely.

  2. Return them to the pan and add eight charges of white syrup, drying them well each time, then put them back in the oven to dry.

Finish

  1. The next day, place them in a balancing pan and pour syrup into a beading funnel boiled to a pearl.

  2. Finish the process over the next two days.

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. Celery + syruptop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery seeds
The main ingredient being candied, giving the body that the syrup coats and dries.
White syrup
Sweetens the seeds and, as it dries, forms a sugar coating that preserves them.

The step that matters

Drying fully before each syrup charge. Each charge of syrup must dry thoroughly before the next is added. Moisture left in the seeds stops the sugar from setting, so they stay sticky and can spoil.

“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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