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Dessert

Wintergrken Taffy

A chewy candy made from sugar, vinegar, glucose, and wintergreen oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wintergrken Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the taffy

  1. Boil sugar, vinegar, and glucose until it snaps when dropped into water.

  2. When partly cool, add oil of wintergreen.

Pull and cut

  1. Pull the mixture over a large nail.

  2. Pull into long strips and cut.

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 + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  2. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  3. Coffee + vinegartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together271 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet, firm candy base as it cooks to a hard-crack stage.
Glucose
Helps prevent crystallization, keeping the taffy smooth and pliable rather than grainy.
Vinegar
Adds a little acidity that helps stop sugar from crystallizing during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil until it snaps in water. Sugar must reach the right temperature to set into taffy that is firm but pullable. Too little cooking leaves it sticky, and too much makes it brittle and hard to pull.

“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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