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Dessert

Nicodemus Pop-corn

Nicodemus Popcorn is sugar-coated popcorn made by boiling butter, water, and sugar, then coating popped corn.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Nicodemus Pop-corn

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In an iron kettle, combine butter, water, and sugar.

  2. Boil until the mixture is ready for candy.

Coat the popcorn

  1. Add the popped corn and stir briskly to coat evenly.

  2. Remove the kettle from the heat and stir until cooled slightly, ensuring each grain is separate and coated with sugar.

  3. Avoid a hot fire to prevent scorching the corn.

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

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Popped corn
Forms the bulk of the snack, which the syrup coats and holds together.
White sugar
Forms a syrup that cooks into a crisp coating that hardens as it cools.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the coating spread smoothly over the corn.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture is ready for candy. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves the coating sticky, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar or make it hard and brittle.

“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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