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Dessert

Peppermint Stick Candy

A candy made from sugar, cream of tartar, and water, cooked to hard‑crack stage and shaped into sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Peppermint Stick Candy

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 330°F (165°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the candy

  1. Combine sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a large pot.

  2. Cook the mixture until it reaches 330°F (165°C).

  3. Pour the cooked candy onto a slab.

Make the red stripe

  1. Cut off a small piece.

  2. Color the piece red for a stripe.

  3. Keep the stripe warm.

Pull and flavor

  1. Pull the remaining batch until it turns white.

  2. Flavor the white batch on a hook.

  3. Twist out the air from the batch.

  4. Form the batch into a flat piece.

  5. Roll the flat piece into a round piece about 18 inches long.

Shape and finish

  1. Place six thin narrow stripes and one wide stripe on the batch.

  2. Shape the batch like a wine bottle to start.

  3. Pull the batch out to the desired size.

  4. Have a helper roll and twist the stick while you pull it out.

  5. For smaller sticks, cut them to the length of jars.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the glassy candy structure and provides the sweetness.
Cream of tartar
Acidity helps keep the sugar syrup smooth and prevents crystallizing.

The step that matters

Cooking to 330°F (165°C). The final temperature controls how much water remains in the sugar. Stopping early leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it brittle and prone to browning or scorching.

“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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