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Dessert

Cream Candies

A sweet confection made by boiling sugar and water with gum‑arabic, cream of tartar, and optional chocolate, flavoring, or coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,294 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Cream Candies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve sugar in water with gum-arabic before heating.

  2. Add cream of tartar to the sugar mixture.

  3. Heat until the mixture reaches the feather stage; test with a skimmer.

Cream and finish

  1. Remove from heat and rub syrup against the sides of the dish with an iron spoon.

  2. For chocolate candy, add sifted chocolate and desired flavoring.

  3. For coconut candy, stir in coconut while the mixture is still soft and let it cool.

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. Vanilla + coconuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,294 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Chocolate + coconuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the body of the candy and becomes the crystalline, creamy mass when worked.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals, keeping the candy smooth.
Gum-arabic
Stabilizer that helps keep the syrup from crystallizing too quickly, giving a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Heating to the feather stage. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration before cooling. Too little cooking leaves the candy soft and sticky; too much makes it hard and grainy. Testing with a skimmer shows when the syrup is ready.

“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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