Skip to main content
Dessert

Old-fashioned Peppermint Cuts

A hard candy made from sugar, water, cream of tartar, and optional red food coloring, cut into sticks.

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 ↓

Old-fashioned Peppermint Cuts

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.

Make the sugar

  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 sugar onto a slab.

Color and shape

  1. Color half a pound of the sugar red.

  2. Keep the colored sugar warm.

  3. Pull the remaining batch until it is nice and white without twisting out the air.

  4. Form the white batch into a round loaf.

  5. Place eight thin red stripes on top of the loaf.

Cut and flavor

  1. Pull out pieces the size of a stick.

  2. Cut the pieces with a butter cup cutter.

  3. Flavor the pieces as desired.

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 base and, when pulled, the structure that holds the stripes.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent sugar from crystallizing, keeping the candy smooth.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked into a clear syrup.
Red food coloring
Gives the red stripes their color.

The step that matters

Pulling the white batch. Pulling incorporates air, which whitens and softens the candy. Twisting out the air is avoided because it would turn the sugar translucent and dense, so the pull must stay gentle and even.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes