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Dessert

Buttered Taffy

A sweet candy made by boiling sugar, water, and cream of tartar, then adding butter and vanilla, and cooling on a slab.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Buttered Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the taffy

  1. Boil sugar, water, and cream of tartar together, stirring constantly.

  2. Add vanilla extract or other flavoring.

  3. Boil until it reaches the crack stage.

  4. Incorporate the butter, either cut into pieces or melted, into the sugar.

Pour and cut

  1. Pour the mixture onto a greased marble slab.

  2. When cool enough, turn in the edges and mark or cut into squares.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Vanilla + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Vanilla and sugar 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the taffy a tender, soft bite.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps keep the sugar smooth by discouraging crystallization.
Sugar
Forms the base of the candy, setting firm as the syrup cooks and cools.

The step that matters

Boil until it reaches the crack stage. Cooking the sugar syrup to the correct temperature controls how hard the taffy sets. Stopping early leaves it soft and sticky, while going too far makes it 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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