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Dessert

Maple Sugar Candy

A candy made by boiling maple syrup and sugar until brittle, optionally with nuts or coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Maple syrup and nuts work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 67 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Candy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine maple syrup and granulated sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture until it becomes brittle when dropped in water.

  3. If desired, add nuts or coconut before cooling.

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. Maple syrup + nutstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Maple syrup + sugartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,252 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Maple syrup
Supplies the main maple flavor and sweetness, and its sugars set firm as the water boils off.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and, as the mixture cooks down, helps the candy harden when cool.

The step that matters

Boil until brittle when dropped in water. Boiling drives off water until the sugar concentration is high enough to set hard when cool. Stopping early leaves a soft, sticky candy, while overcooking can scorch the sugars and make the candy bitter.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (maple syrup, sugar):

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits about as well
  3. Nutsthe original
  4. Flaxseedfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against maple syrup, sugar. 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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