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Dessert

Fruit Tablets

A confection made by boiling sugar, water, and cream of tartar, then cooling, rolling, and coating with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fruit Tablets

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cream of tartar, and water in a large kettle.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Cover with a tin or wooden lid and steam for five minutes, then remove the cover.

  4. Wash the inside of the kettle with a damp sponge or scrub brush.

  5. Cook the mixture until it reaches 330°F (165°C).

Shape the tablets

  1. Pour the cooked mixture onto a cold, greased slab.

  2. Fold the slab up.

  3. Add acid, flavor, and color to your preference.

  4. Once cool, run the mixture through a tablet roller.

  5. Coat the tablets with sugar.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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 bulk of the candy and provides its sweetness and firm, set structure.
Cream of tartar
An acid that discourages large sugar crystals, keeping the tablets smooth rather than grainy.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until it reaches 330°F (165°C). The final temperature sets how much water remains in the sugar. Stopping early leaves the tablets soft and sticky, while going too far makes them hard, brittle, or scorched.

“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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