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Dessert

Old Fashioned Peppermints

A simple peppermint candy made by boiling sugar and water, then adding peppermint oil and dropping onto waxed paper.

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 ↓

Old Fashioned Peppermints

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil until clear.

  3. Remove the saucepan from heat.

  4. Stir the mixture until it looks milky.

Flavour and shape

  1. Add peppermint oil to the mixture.

  2. Drop small amounts onto waxed paper using a spoon or small pitcher.

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

Sugar
Forms the candy's sweet, glassy base as the syrup cooks and cools.
Peppermint oil
Provides the concentrated minty aroma and flavour of the candies.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it looks milky. As the syrup cools and is stirred, sugar begins to crystallise and the mixture turns opaque. Stirring too early or too long can make the candies grainy instead of smooth.

“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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