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Dessert

Fruit Candies

A sweet candy made by boiling sugar with fruit juice until the crack stage and forming into buttons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,598 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Candies

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Add the fruit juice and continue boiling until a bead dropped on a greased surface hardens.

  3. Drop the hot candy in buttons on greased tins.

  4. Once cold, store the candies in air-tight boxes.

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 + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the candy base, setting firm as it cooks to the crack stage.
Fruit juice
Adds flavour and a little moisture that shapes the boiled sugar's final character.

The step that matters

Boiling to the bead test. Sugar must be boiled to the right concentration; a bead dropped on a greased surface should harden. Too little cooking leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it brittle or scorched.

“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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