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Tablets, Sugar, Flavoured

A flavored sugar tablet made by boiling sugar with water, egg white, and spices, then cooling into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Tablets, Sugar, Flavoured

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Break sugar into small pieces.

  2. Pour ¼ pint of water beaten with egg white over the sugar.

  3. Let the mixture stand until dissolved.

  4. Heat until boiling.

  5. Add another ¼ pint of water.

  6. Let it boil again without stirring.

  7. Remove from heat.

  8. Let syrup settle.

Clarify and flavour

  1. Carefully remove the scum.

  2. Put the scum on an inverted sieve.

  3. Drain any clear syrup back into the mixture.

  4. Flavor the syrup with cinnamon oil, lemon peel, or ginger.

  5. Return to the pan.

Cook and set

  1. Boil until it reaches candy height, forming a thread when tested.

  2. Pour onto a large flat dish or oiled slab.

  3. Quickly mark into squares before it cools.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + cinnamontop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 tablets and sets firm as the syrup cools.
Egg white
Its proteins rise with the heat and carry the scum to the surface, clarifying the syrup.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling to candy height. Sugar must reach the right concentration to set firm as tablets. Too little cooking leaves them soft and sticky, while overcooking makes them brittle.

“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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