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Dessert

Plain Lemon Taffy

A simple taffy flavored with lemon juice and extract, made by boiling sugar and water to crack stage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Plain Lemon Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar with water until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Add the lemon juice and lemon extract, then continue boiling until the syrup changes color.

Pour and mark

  1. Prepare a well-oiled tin pan with sweet oil.

  2. Pour the syrup into the pan.

  3. Lightly oil a warm knife.

  4. Mark the taffy into blocks by pressing the knife downwards.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Forms the sweet syrup base that sets into the chewy taffy structure as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness, and helps keep the sugar from crystallizing too early.
Lemon extract
Adds concentrated lemon aroma without extra liquid to disturb the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling to the crack stage. The syrup's final sugar concentration sets the taffy's texture as it cools. Stopping too early leaves it soft and sticky, while boiling too long makes it hard and brittle.

“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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