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Dessert

Mint Grit Drops

A candy made by boiling sugar with peppermint oil and dropping it onto sheets to firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and peppermint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,082 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Mint Grit Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sugar paste

  1. Combine 10 lbs of granulated sugar with enough water to make a thick paste in a kettle.

  2. Prepare two small copper lip-pans.

  3. Fill each lip-pan with about 3 lbs of the sugar paste.

Cook and drop

  1. Heat one lip-pan on the fire until it boils around the sides. Stir the pan.

  2. Remove the pan from heat. Flavor the mixture with oil of peppermint.

  3. Heat the second lip-pan until it boils.

  4. Scrape drops from the first pan with a large knitting needle. Drop the scraped drops onto clean sheets.

  5. Continue this process until all the sugar is used.

Set

  1. Allow the drops to firm up. Remove the drops from the sheets.

  2. Let them sit overnight.

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 + pepperminttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,082 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Forms the bulk of the drops and sets firm as it cools, giving them their crisp texture.
Oil of peppermint
Provides the mint flavor that scents and flavors the finished drops.

The step that matters

Heating the lip-pan until it boils around the sides. Sugar syrup must reach a boil so that its concentration rises enough to set firm and hard once cooled. Heating too little leaves drops soft and sticky, while heating too long can darken or over-harden the sugar.

“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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