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Dessert

French Cream Candy

A hard candy made from sugar, water, and cream of tartar, flavored and colored before molding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

French Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, water, and cream of tartar in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture without stirring until a drop forms a soft ball in cold water.

  3. Remove the saucepan to a cool place without shaking.

Make the candy

  1. When the bottom of the saucepan is cool enough to touch, beat the syrup until creamy.

  2. Take a portion of the cream and work it until smooth.

  3. Flavor and color as desired, then mold into shapes.

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. 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 sweet crystalline body of the candy once the syrup is cooled and worked.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup without burning.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals, keeping the candy smooth and creamy.

The step that matters

Leaving the syrup undisturbed while it cools. Stirring or shaking cooled syrup can trigger sudden sugar crystallization, producing a grainy rather than smooth texture. Letting it cool undisturbed until the bottom is cool enough to touch keeps the crystals fine.

“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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