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Dessert

Cream Candies

A confection made by heating sugar, water, gum arabic, and cream of tartar to soft ball stage, optionally flavored or coated with chocolate or coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,294 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Cream Candies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water with the gum arabic before combining.

  2. Add the cream of tartar to the sugar mixture.

  3. Heat the mixture until it reaches the soft ball stage, indicated by feathery filaments when blowing through a skimmer.

Finish the candy

  1. Remove from heat and rub the syrup against the sides of the dish with an iron spoon.

  2. For chocolate candy, stir in the sifted chocolate and your choice of flavoring.

  3. For coconut candy, add coconut while the mixture is still soft and stir until cool.

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. Vanilla + coconuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,294 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Chocolate + coconuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 bulk of the candy and sets into a firm, crystalline texture as the syrup cools.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps prevent sugar from crystallizing too large, keeping the candy smooth.
Gum arabic
Acts as a stabilizer that helps keep the sugar syrup smooth and resistant to recrystallizing.

The step that matters

Heat to the soft ball stage. Stopping at the right temperature controls how much water remains in the syrup. Too little cooking leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle.

“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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