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Dessert

Peanut Brittle

A sweet brittle made by cooking sugar with peanuts and pouring onto a greased surface.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peanut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,754 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Peanut Brittle

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the sugar

  1. Place 2 cups of sugar in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir constantly until the sugar melts.

Add peanuts and set

  1. Quickly stir in 1 teacup of chopped peanuts and mix thoroughly.

  2. Pour the mixture onto a buttered platter and spread it thin.

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. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + peanuttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Melts into a syrup that cools into a hard, brittle, glassy candy.
Peanuts
Add crunch and a nutty flavor that contrasts with the sweet, brittle sugar.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while the sugar melts. Sugar melts unevenly over direct heat and can scorch at the bottom of the pan. Constant stirring spreads the heat, giving an even, amber-free syrup that sets into clean brittle.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Peanutthe 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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