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Cinnamon Comfits

Cinnamon sticks coated with syrup and dried to produce sweet confections.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and syrup work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 990 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cinnamon Comfits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cinnamon

  1. Soak the cinnamon in warm water for 2–3 hours until soft.

  2. Cut the cinnamon into thin pieces, about half an inch long.

  3. Dry the cinnamon in a stove until sufficiently dry.

Coat the cinnamon

  1. In a pan over a charcoal fire, whisk syrup over the cinnamon while shaking the pan.

  2. Repeat this process 2–3 times a day until the cinnamon is white and has a consistent coating.

  3. Once coated, whiten the cinnamon with additional syrup, drying them after each charge.

  4. Sift the cinnamon to remove any dust before drying.

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. Cinnamon + syruptop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together990 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

Cinnamon
Forms the main body of the candy, which the syrup coats.
Syrup
Builds a sugar coating that whitens and hardens over the cinnamon pieces.

The step that matters

Drying between syrup coats. Each coat must dry fully before the next is added, because wet syrup layers stay sticky and can fail to build an even, hard coating.

“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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