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Dessert

A Tire, or London Candy

A sweet candy made from treacle, cinnamon, ginger, lemon peel and juice, boiled and pulled into sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Tire, or London Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease the bottom and sides of a brass pan with fresh butter.

  2. Prepare narrow strips of white-brown paper to twist around the sticks as they are cut.

Make the candy

  1. Boil the treacle with cinnamon, ginger, lemon peel, and lemon juice, stirring constantly.

  2. After about 10 minutes, drop a little mixture onto a buttered plate to check if it hardens.

  3. If it hardens, pour the mixture onto buttered plates.

  4. Once cool enough to handle, pull the candy using a machine or buttered hands.

  5. Continue to work the candy until it hardens and lightens in color.

Shape and finish

  1. Quickly pull it into small sticks and cut with a buttered knife on a floured surface.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + rumtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Rum + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,007 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Treacle
Forms the dark, sweet base that the candy is built from.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the treacle.
Ginger
Contributes warm, spicy aroma to the candy.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma that complements the treacle.

The step that matters

Testing the set on a buttered plate. Treacle is mostly sugar, and its hardness depends on how far the mixture has cooked. Pulling too early leaves it sticky, while waiting too long makes it brittle and hard to shape. A small test drop shows when it is ready before it is poured.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cinnamon, ginger, rum, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, ginger, rum, butter. 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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