Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
To Boil Sugar for Spinning
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Break the sugar into small lumps.
Place the sugar in a sugar boiler and add enough cold water to saturate it.
Allow the sugar to dissolve.
Add a pinch of cream of tartar.
Boil
Set the boiler on the fire and bring to a boil until it reaches the crack stage.
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.
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Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Forms the syrup that sets into the spun sugar threads when cooled.
- Cream of tartar
- Acid that helps prevent the sugar from crystallising as it boils.
The step that matters
Boiling until the crack stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set hard and brittle when cooled. Stopping too early leaves it too soft to spin into threads, while going too far makes it burn or turn bitter.
“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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