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New Orleans Molasses Candy

Molasses candy made by boiling sugar, molasses, vinegar, and butter until hard, then adding baking soda and cooling into sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

New Orleans Molasses Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, molasses, vinegar, and butter.

  2. Boil the mixture without stirring until it hardens when dropped into cold water.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in baking soda, mixing well.

  4. Add flavoring just before pouring if desired.

  5. Pour the mixture into buttered tins.

Finish

  1. Once cool, cut into sticks.

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 + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Molasses + vinegartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and the bulk of the mass that hardens into brittle candy.
New orleans molasses
Adds deep flavor and color, and keeps the candy from being purely crisp sugar.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot syrup to release gas, making the candy light and porous.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps prevent sugar from crystallizing and supports the reaction with baking soda.

The step that matters

Boil without stirring until it hardens in cold water. Stirring can trigger sugar crystallization, leaving a grainy candy. Cooking to the hard-crack stage gives the brittle texture, so underheating leaves it sticky and overheating makes it 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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