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Peppermint Candy Drops

A hard candy made from sugar, peppermint essence, acetic acid, and water, set in a tin and cut into tablets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peppermint and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 208 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Peppermint Candy Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. Boil the sugar with just enough water to dissolve it until it reaches the ball stage.

  2. Add a few drops of peppermint essence and acetic acid.

  3. Work the sugar with the back of a spoon against the sides of the boiler to create a granular appearance.

Set and break

  1. Pour the sugar into a shallow tin dish.

  2. When half-set, mark it with the back of a knife into small tablets.

  3. Once fully set, break the tablets apart along the marked lines.

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. Peppermint + almondtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together208 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + pepperminttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,082 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

Crushed loaf sugar
Forms the candy base, setting into a hard, brittle sugar mass as it cools.
Acetic acid
Adds a slight sharpness that balances the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Marking the tablets while half-set. Sugar must be partly firm but still pliable when scored. If it sets fully first, the knife cannot mark clean lines and the tablets will break unevenly instead of along the marks.

Swap the peppermint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Peppermintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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