Skip to main content
Dessert

After Dinner Mints

A sugar-based mint confection made by boiling sugar, water, and cream of tartar, then pulling and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

After Dinner Mints

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 270°F (132°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the sugar base

  1. In a large pot, combine sugar, water, and cream of tartar.

  2. Cook the mixture until it reaches 270°F (132°C).

  3. Pour the cooked mixture onto a slab and let it cool.

Pull and shape

  1. Once cool, fold and pull the mixture on a hook, adding flavoring while pulling.

  2. Avoid twisting the air out of the mixture.

  3. Place it on a spinning table and pull out to desired thickness.

  4. Cut into shapes using a butter cup cutter, shears, or rollers.

Set and store

  1. Let the mints set until they grain, then store in jars to keep them soft or crystallize for sale.

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).

  2. Sugar + minttop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

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

  3. Cream + minttop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together594 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the mass of the mints and sets into a firm, crystalline candy as it cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals from forming, keeping the texture smooth.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked evenly into a syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking to 270°F (132°C). The final temperature sets how much water remains in the syrup, which determines how firm or soft the mints become once cooled and pulled. Undercooking leaves them sticky; overcooking makes them brittle.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Mint JellyMint Jelly22 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes