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Dessert

Coffee Cbeams

A coffee and sugar fudge with chopped nuts, set in a buttered tin and cut into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and nuts work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Coffee Cbeams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil together the coffee and sugar until the syrup strings when it drops from the spoon.

  2. Remove from the heat and beat hard until creamy.

  3. Stir in the chopped nuts.

Set and cut

  1. Pour into a shallow buttered tin to cool.

  2. Cut into squares after it is completely cold.

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. Coffee + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Coffee + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet syrup base that cooks down and sets firm as it cools.
Strong coffee
Adds the main coffee flavour and aroma while dissolving into the sugar syrup.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and texture that contrasts with the smooth, firm candy.

The step that matters

Boil to the string stage. Boiling concentrates the sugar so the candy sets firm as it cools. Undercooked syrup stays soft and sticky, while overcooked syrup turns hard and brittle.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, 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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