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Dessert

White Cream Candy

A sugar candy made with cream of tartar, Prussian blue, and vanilla, formed into sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

White Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Combine 8 pounds of sugar and 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar in a pan.

  2. Add enough water to dissolve the sugar and mix well.

  3. Melt a little Prussian blue in water.

  4. Add the melted Prussian blue to the sugar mixture to achieve a blue-white color.

Cook and pull

  1. Boil the mixture until done, then pour it onto a well-oiled marble surface.

  2. Fold the edges of the candy into the center to form a ball.

  3. Attach the ball to a hook on the wall and pull the candy toward you, wrapping it around the hook each time.

  4. Continue pulling until the candy is perfectly white.

Shape and flavor

  1. Shape the candy into a long roll and cut it into sticks of your desired length.

  2. Flavor the candy with vanilla.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Forms the candy's sweet, crystalline base as it cooks and sets.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing too coarsely, keeping the candy smooth.
Prussian blue
Colouring agent that gives the candy its blue-white tint.

The step that matters

Pulling until white. Pulling incorporates air into the cooling sugar, which lightens its color and sets its texture. Stopping too early leaves the candy translucent and dense, while the pulling must happen before it hardens.

“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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