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Pop Corn Balls

A sweet treat made by coating popped corn with a sugar-molasses-butter syrup and forming into balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 349 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pop Corn Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water for 5 minutes.

  2. Add molasses, butter, and salt; boil slowly, stirring occasionally, until a drop in cold water becomes hard.

Coat and shape

  1. Pour syrup over popped corn and stir until evenly coated.

  2. Quickly form the mixture into balls.

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. Walnut + corntop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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

Sugar
Forms the syrup base and, once cooked to hardness, binds the corn into shapes.
Molasses
Adds depth of flavour and some extra sweetness to the syrup.
Popped corn
Forms the bulk of the balls, with the syrup clinging to its surface.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to hardness. The syrup must reach the hard-crack stage before it hits the corn. Underdone syrup stays sticky and the balls will not hold their shape; overdone syrup turns brittle and bitter. Testing a drop in cold water shows when it is ready.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, molasses, butter, corn):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Lima beansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, molasses, butter, corn. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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