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Dessert

Molasses Cocoanut Bar

A sweet bar made from coconut, molasses, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Molasses Cocoanut Bar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the coconuts.

Make the coconut bar

  1. In a saucepan, combine molasses and butter over low heat.

  2. Once boiling, slowly add the coconut while stirring.

  3. Continue stirring over low heat until it reaches soft crack stage in winter or hard crack stage in summer.

Set and cut

  1. Pour onto a slab, spread thin with a palette knife, and cut into bars when cool.

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. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  2. Molasses + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Coconut + molassestop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together96 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Coconut
Provides the bulk and chewy texture of the bar.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and flavor, and helps bind the coconut.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer bite in the finished bar.

The step that matters

Cooking to the correct crack stage. Sugar syrup set by temperature: soft crack gives a chewier bar, hard crack a firmer one. Cooking too far or too little changes the texture, and the stage used depends on the season and humidity, so it is easy to misjudge.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, butter. 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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