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Dessert

French Cream Candy

A sugar candy made by boiling sugar and water, then cooling and shaping into creamy rolls, cubes, or other forms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

French Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a bright tin pan and boil without stirring for 10 minutes.

  2. Test the mixture by letting some drop from a spoon; if it threads, remove from heat.

  3. If it hasn't boiled enough, return it to the heat for 1-2 minutes, being careful not to overcook.

Make the cream

  1. Rub a small spoonful against the side of a bowl; if it becomes creamy and rolls into a ball, pour the mixture into the bowl.

  2. Once cool enough to handle, stir or beat with a large spoon until it resembles cream.

  3. Add flavoring as it begins to cool.

Shape and serve

  1. Shape the cream into rolls, cubes, or any desired form, and decorate with almonds if desired.

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 + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Forms the bulk of the candy and, when boiled and then worked, crystallizes into a smooth, creamy texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can boil evenly into a syrup before cooking.

The step that matters

Stirring the cream stage. Stirring while the syrup is boiling can trigger large sugar crystals, so it must stay unstirred until the mixture is cooled and then beaten. Overcooking makes the candy hard and brittle rather than creamy.

“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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