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Dessert

To Make Cinnamon, Lemon, Horehound, or Ginger Tablet

A hard tablet made from sugar, flavored with cinnamon, lemon, ginger, or horehound.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Make Cinnamon, Lemon, Horehound, or Ginger Tablet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tablet

  1. Choose your flavoring: oil of cinnamon, ginger, or lemon.

  2. Mix the flavoring with 1 pound of boiling sugar.

Pour and mark

  1. Pour the mixture onto a marble slab greased with sweet oil.

  2. Quickly mark the tablet into small squares using a roller and knife.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the body of the tablet; boiled sugar hardens into a brittle candy as it cools.
China ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma and a pleasant bite.
Lemon zest
Adds bright citrus aroma and a touch of sharpness from its oils.
Oil of cinnamon
Adds concentrated cinnamon flavor and aroma.

The step that matters

Marking the tablet quickly. Boiled sugar sets harder as it cools, so it becomes brittle and difficult to cut cleanly. Marking the squares while the mixture is still warm and soft lets the lines form before it sets.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cinnamon, ginger, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, ginger, 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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