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Maple Caramels

Maple Caramels are made by melting maple sugar with milk and butter, cooking to ball stage, then pouring onto a plate and cutting into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Maple Caramels

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Melt the maple sugar in a teacup of sweet milk and a tablespoon of butter.

  2. Cook the mixture until it reaches a hard ball stage (almost brittle) when tested in cold water.

Set and cut

  1. Pour the mixture onto a buttered plate.

  2. Mark into squares when cool enough to handle.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Maple sugar
Provides the main sweetness and maple flavor, and its sugar content sets the caramel's firmness as it cools.
Sweet milk
Dissolves the sugar and adds milk solids that give the caramel a softer, creamier body.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer texture and helps keep the caramel from sticking.

The step that matters

Cook to the hard ball stage. Sugar syrup firms as its concentration rises and its temperature climbs. Cooking too little leaves soft, sticky caramels, while cooking too long makes them hard and brittle. Testing in cold water shows when the mixture has reached the right concentration.

“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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