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Dessert

Molasses Candy

Molasses candy is made by boiling molasses and brown sugar until it hardens, optionally adding nuts or almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and almond work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 394 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Molasses Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a square tin pan.

Make the candy

  1. Mix the molasses and brown sugar in a large pot.

  2. Boil the mixture over medium heat for 3 hours until it stops boiling and becomes crisp when cold.

  3. If using ground nuts, roast, shell, and blanch them.

  4. Stir the nuts into the mixture a few minutes before removing it from the heat.

  5. If using almonds, blanch them and cut the almonds into pieces.

  6. Stir the almonds into the mixture raw when the mixture is done boiling.

  7. Pour the mixture into the pan to cool.

Shape and cut

  1. Pull the candy into a thick string while warm, extending your arms widely.

  2. Roll the candy into sticks.

  3. Twist two sticks together.

  4. Cut the sticks smoothly at both ends.

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. Nuts + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  4. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides the main body, dark color and rich sweet flavor of the candy.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the candy set firm as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture for 3 hours. The candy sets hard only when it is boiled long enough to reach a high sugar concentration. Stopping early leaves it soft and sticky, while boiling too long can scorch the molasses and make it bitter.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, sugar, lemon, butter, almond):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Flaxseedfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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

More molasses candy recipes

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