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Dessert

Candy — Bonbon— Conserve

A sugar candy preserve made with butter, cream of tartar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter 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 ↓

Candy — Bonbon— Conserve

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add butter to the sugar when it starts boiling to prevent it from rising over the pan.

  2. Mix cream of tartar with sugar and water.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, ensuring it doesn't grain.

  4. If it starts to grain, move it to a cooler spot and handle it minimally.

  5. If overcooked, add a little water and boil again.

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. Cream + buttertop 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 base of the syrup and sets its texture as it cooks.
Cream of tartar
Its acidity helps keep sugar from crystallizing into a grainy texture.
Butter
Its fat reduces foaming so the boiling mixture does not rise over the pan.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil without graining. Sugar syrup turns grainy when sugar crystals form during boiling. Handling it gently and moving it to a cooler spot if graining starts helps keep it smooth, because agitation and stray crystals can trigger crystallization.

“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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