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Frosted Codims, Served in Different Ways

A dish of codlings boiled, skinned, buttered, sugared, and baked until the sugar crystallizes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Frosted Codims, Served in Different Ways

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and peel

  1. Boil the codlins slowly in spring water with a little purified alum.

  2. Remove them when they rise, then skin them.

Frost and dry

  1. Rub the codlins with clarified butter and sift loaf sugar over them.

  2. Place them in a slow oven until the sugar crystallizes.

  3. Optionally, remove them halfway through and sprinkle with sugar the size of small pearls.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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

Loaf sugar
Forms the crisp, crystalline frosted coating and adds sweetness to the outside of the fruit.
Clarified butter
Adds fat that gives a thin sheen and helps the sugar stick to the fruit's surface.
Purified alum
Helps firm the fruit's flesh during boiling so it holds its shape.

The step that matters

Place them in a slow oven until the sugar crystallizes. Sugar crystallizes into a frosted surface only when heated gently. If the oven is too hot, the sugar melts and turns into a sticky glaze or browns instead of drying into crystals.

“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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