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Dessert

Prepare Peanut Brittle

Peanut brittle is a hard candy made by boiling sugar and water, then adding nuts and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Prepare Peanut Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 1 cup of sugar in ½ cup of water.

  2. When the syrup reaches the caramel stage (290-350°F or 143-177°C), pour it over chopped nuts spread on a buttered pan.

  3. Mark the mixture in squares as 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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Nuts + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 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

Sugar
Melts and caramelises into the hard, glassy candy that gives brittle its snap.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and body, breaking up the hard candy as you eat it.

The step that matters

Pouring at the caramel stage. Sugar syrup hardens as its temperature rises. Pour too early and the brittle stays soft and sticky. Go too far and the sugar darkens and turns bitter. The 290-350°F (143-177°C) range is the window where it sets crisp.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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.

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