Skip to main content
Dessert

Clove Squares

Clove Squares are a candied confection made from sugar, glucose, burnt sugar, and clove.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Clove Squares

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a kettle, combine 7 pounds of sugar and 3 pounds of glucose with enough water to dissolve them.

  2. Cook the mixture to 270°F to 280°F.

  3. Stir in a few drops of burnt sugar and flavor with clove.

Shape and finish

  1. Pour the mixture onto a slab and fold up the edges.

  2. Knead the batch until it turns a nice brown color.

  3. Quickly roll it out thin and mark it with a caramel cutter.

  4. Once cold, break it 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. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides the sweet, crystalline base that hardens into a brittle candy when cooled.
Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallization, keeping the candy smooth and glassy rather than grainy.
Burnt sugar
Adds a deeper brown color and a toasty, caramel-like flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture to 270°F to 280°F. This temperature range sets the sugar's final hardness once cooled. Undercooked syrup stays sticky and soft, while overcooked syrup turns bitter and brittle in the wrong way.

“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

Clove CakeClove Cake53 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes