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Dessert

Crystallized Corn

A sweet snack made by coating popcorn with boiled sugar and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter 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 ↓

Crystallized Corn

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, boil the sugar until it reaches a hair stage.

  2. Add a small piece of butter to the boiling sugar.

  3. Pour the sugar mixture over the popcorn and stir well.

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 + buttertop 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

White sugar
Sweetens the popcorn and cooks into a glossy, hard caramel coating as it boils.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a smoother, less brittle coating.
Popcorn
Forms the crisp base that the cooked sugar syrup clings to and hardens on.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the hair stage. The sugar must be cooked to the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves a sticky coating that never sets, while cooking too long makes the caramel bitter and brittle as it cools.

“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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