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Dessert

Corn Puff or Brittle

A brittle made from boiled glucose, sugar, and popped corn.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Puff or Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water, glucose, and sugar at 290°F (143°C).

  2. Once boiling, remove from heat and stir in popped corn until the mixture is fairly stiff.

Add soda and set

  1. Dissolve baking soda in a small amount of milk and add to the mixture.

  2. Spread the mixture inside a frame to cool.

  3. For a juicier version, use 5 lbs of glucose and 5 lbs of sugar, boiling only to 265°F (129°C).

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 + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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

Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallization, keeping the brittle smooth rather than grainy.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, once boiled hot enough, the hard, crisp set.
Baking soda
Releases gas into the hot syrup, creating bubbles that lighten the texture and make it brittle.
Popped corn
Forms the bulk of the brittle, held together by the cooked syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling to the stated temperature. The final temperature sets how much water remains in the syrup. Higher temperatures leave less water, producing a harder, crisper brittle, while lower temperatures give a softer, chewier result.

“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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