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Dessert

Licorice Drops

A sweet candy made by dissolving licorice in boiling water, adding sugar, boiling until hard, 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: Licorice and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 76 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Licorice Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the licorice

  1. Break the licorice into small pieces.

  2. Pour boiling water over the licorice and keep warm until dissolved.

Cook and set

  1. Add granulated sugar and boil until it hardens in water.

  2. Pour into shallow buttered tins and mark off into squares.

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. Licorice + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together76 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

Pure licorice
Supplies the main flavour, dissolving into the hot water to scent the whole batch.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens and, once boiled down and cooled, sets into a hard, brittle candy.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar until it hardens in water. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar. Stopping too early leaves the drops soft and sticky. Boiling too long darkens the sugar, making it bitter and brittle.

“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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