Name: Cream Candy
Ingredients: 4 cups sugar; 1½ cups cold water; a pinch of salt; 1 cup cream

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Candy

Ingredients

4 cups sugar
1½ cups cold water
a pinch of salt
1 cup cream

Directions

Prepare and boil

Combine sugar and cold water with a pinch of salt in a deep pot.
Boil the mixture until it reaches a syrupy consistency. Do not stir during cooking.

Add cream and cook

Pour in the cream and continue boiling until the candy hardens when tested in cold water.

Pull and store

Pull the candy for 30 minutes.
Store the candy in an airtight container.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Forms the candy's structure and sweetness as the syrup cooks and hardens.
Cream: Adds fat and richness, softening the texture of the finished candy.