Name: Artificial Honey
Ingredients: 10 pounds white sugar; 2 pounds clear bees' honey; 1 quart hot water; ½ ounce cream of tartar; 2-3 drops rose oil; handful of clear yellow honeycomb, broken up

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Artificial Honey

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the white sugar, clear bees' honey, hot water, and cream of tartar in a large bowl.
Allow the mixture to cool.
Add 2-3 drops of rose oil for flavor.
Sprinkle in the broken honeycomb and stir well.

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Honey + rosetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together94 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + honeytop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,932 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,584 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Honey + creamtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together738 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar: Provides most of the sweetness and body of the syrup.
Clear bees' honey: Adds sweetness, moisture, and honey flavor to the mixture.
Cream of tartar: Its acidity partly breaks sugar into smaller sugars, helping keep the mixture from crystallizing.

“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.