Skip to main content
Dessert

Cocoanut Taffy

A chewy candy made from sugar, molasses, butter, and grated coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cocoanut Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the taffy

  1. In a copper kettle, combine the brown sugar, glucose, molasses, cream of tartar, and butter.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches the soft ball stage.

  3. Add the grated cocoa nuts and continue to boil, stirring, until it reaches the crack stage.

Shape and finish

  1. Pour the mixture onto a slab and pull it over a hook to draw it into bars.

  2. Lay the bars side by side and cut them into squares with a caramel cutter.

  3. Allow to cool completely before breaking apart.

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. 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

Light brown sugar
Provides sweetness and a deep caramel flavor, and helps set the taffy's chewy body.
Glucose
Inhibits crystallization, keeping the taffy smooth and preventing a grainy texture.
Molasses
Adds dark color, moisture, and a rich, slightly bitter caramel flavor.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the sugar syrup, helping prevent crystals from forming.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender bite and a smoother, richer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boiling to the crack stage. Cooking to the correct temperature controls the final texture. Stopping early leaves the taffy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle. Sugar syrups harden as their water content falls, so the stage is set by temperature rather than time.

“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.

You might also like

Molasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesMolasses Sponge CakeMolasses Sponge Cake9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes