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Dessert

Fruit Bar

A candied fruit confection made by cooking sugar and water to hard crack, then adding fruit and cooling into bars.

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

Fruit Bar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water.

  2. Add cream of tartar and cook until it reaches hard crack stage.

Add the fruit and set

  1. Carefully stir in the candied fruit.

  2. Continue stirring until the fruit slides off the spoon easily.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pan and let it cool.

  4. Once set, cut into bars.

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 + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Cream + pineappletop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sugar mass that cooks down and sets firm as the bar cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing into a grainy texture.
Candied fruit
Supplies the fruit flavor and chewy pieces suspended in the set sugar.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to hard crack stage. Hard crack stage means the sugar has been cooked to a very high temperature, so little water remains. This gives a firm bar that sets hard as it cools. Undercooked syrup stays soft and sticky, and overcooked syrup can scorch or taste bitter.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe 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.

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