Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Home-made Horehound Candy
Ingredients
Directions
Make the extract
Boil the dried horehound in 1½ pints of water for about 30 minutes to extract the flavor.
Strain the mixture through muslin until clear.
Cook the syrup
Add 3½ pounds of brown sugar to the extract and boil over high heat.
Cook until a drop of syrup hardens in cold water.
Set and mark
Pour the mixture into a buttered tin.
Once cooled, mark into squares.
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.
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Dried horehound
- Provides the characteristic bitter, herbal flavor of the candy.
- Brown sugar
- Provides sweetness and, as the syrup concentrates, the firm body that sets the candy.
The step that matters
Cook until a drop hardens in cold water. Sugar sets according to how much water has boiled off. Stopping too early leaves a soft, sticky candy that will not hold its shape, while cooking too long makes it brittle and can scorch and taste bitter.
“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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