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Dessert

Peppermint Creams

A peppermint-flavored sugar candy made by boiling sugar and water, adding cream of tartar, peppermint essence, and oil, then shaping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Peppermint Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar base

  1. Boil sugar and water until it drops clear.

  2. Add cream of tartar and stir well.

Shape the creams

  1. Pour into a basin and stir until white.

  2. Add the essence of peppermint and mix well.

  3. Drop desired size onto clean white paper.

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).

  2. Peppermint + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together632 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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

Sugar
Forms the sweet, firm body of the cream once cooled and stirred.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the syrup, helping prevent crystallisation for a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Stir the syrup until it turns white. Stirring after boiling triggers fine sugar crystallisation, which makes the cream opaque and fondant-like. Stirring too early or too little changes the set and texture, so the cream may stay syrupy or grainy.

Swap the peppermint

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Peppermintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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