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Dessert

Good Butter Taffy

A chewy candy made from sugar, water, butter, vinegar, lemon extract, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Good Butter Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together with vinegar for about 15 minutes.

  2. Add the butter and continue cooking until it hardens easily in cold water.

Finish and shape

  1. Quickly stir in the lemon extract.

  2. Pour onto buttered plates to cool.

  3. Once cooled, roll or cut into squares.

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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  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
Provides the sweetness and forms the hard, glassy structure of the taffy as it cooks.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps prevent the sugar from turning grainy or crystallising.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the chew and gives the taffy its rich flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking until it hardens in cold water. Sugar syrup sets according to how much water has boiled off. Stopping too early leaves the taffy sticky, while cooking too long makes it brittle or scorched.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, vinegar, lemon. 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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