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Dessert

Frosted Popcorn

A sweet coating of boiled sugar syrup is poured over popped corn and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Frosted Popcorn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil sugar and water in a saucepan until it reaches a hard stage (soft ball stage).

  2. While boiling, shake the popped corn to remove any hard kernels.

Coat and finish

  1. Pour the syrup over the popped corn.

  2. Sift powdered sugar over the coated popcorn.

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 + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolved in water and cooked, it forms the sweet, crisp coating that hardens as the syrup cools.
Popped corn
Forms the light, crisp base that the hardened syrup coats and holds together.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to the hard stage. The final temperature of the syrup decides how the coating sets. Stopping short leaves a sticky coating that won't harden, while cooking too far can scorch the sugar and taste bitter.

“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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