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Dessert

Molasses Candy

Molasses candy is a sweet made by boiling molasses with baking soda, then adding nuts and shaping into sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and hazelnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 186 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Molasses Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy base

  1. Boil the molasses until it becomes crisp when dropped in water.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in a little warm water, then stir it into the molasses until well mixed.

  3. Pour the mixture into buttered pans.

Pull and shape

  1. Pull part of the candy until it turns white.

  2. Shape the white candy into sticks.

Add the nuts

  1. In the remaining mixture, add your choice of roasted corn, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, or hazelnuts.

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. Almond + hazelnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Walnut + hazelnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Peanut + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

  5. Corn + peanuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together346 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Forms the candy base and gives it its dark color, deep flavor and sweetness.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot molasses to create gas bubbles that lighten the candy's texture.

The step that matters

Boil the molasses until it becomes crisp when dropped in water. Molasses must reach a high enough sugar concentration to set firm and brittle when cooled. Undercooked molasses stays sticky and will not hold its shape when pulled or cut.

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, butter, corn, walnut, almond, hazelnut):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Mixed nutsfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, butter, corn, walnut, almond, hazelnut. 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.

More molasses candy recipes

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