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Dessert

Chewing Taffy

A chewy candy made from sugar, water, butter, glucose, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chewing Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the taffy

  1. Combine sugar and water in a pot and stir until it begins to boil.

  2. Add glucose, butter, and cream of tartar, stirring well.

  3. Cook the mixture until it reaches the crack stage.

Set and cut

  1. Pour into buttered platters or pans.

  2. Once cooled, cut into bars or squares.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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 sweet, firm body of the taffy as it cooks and sets.
Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallization, keeping the taffy smooth and chewy rather than grainy.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the texture and gives a richer mouthfeel.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent sugar from crystallizing, keeping the texture smooth.

The step that matters

Cook to the crack stage. Sugar syrup must reach the correct temperature for the crack stage. Undercooking leaves the taffy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle, so the final texture depends on this endpoint.

“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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