Why it works: Sugar and myrtle work together. They rank in the top 38% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. The science ↓
A Spun Sugar Py Ramid
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Prepare four or five round moulds and oil them neatly.
Spin the sugar
Boil sugar as for silver web, letting it cook for one minute longer.
Using the shank of a spoon, spin sugar near the side of each mould without creating blotches.
Once cold, remove the spun sugar from the moulds and stack them using hot sugar to adhere them together.
Spin long threads of sugar around the stacked moulds to form a complete pyramid.
Finish
Optionally, spin sugar threads to resemble feathers or place a sprig of myrtle on top and spin sugar around it.
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.
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Sugar + myrtletop 38% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together32 recipes
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Forms the spun threads and, when reheated, the hot sugar that glues the moulds together.
The step that matters
Spinning without blotches. Sugar cooked to the right stage and drawn into fine threads sets as strong, glassy strands. If the sugar is overcooked, too cool, or dropped in clumps, it forms blotches or brittle lumps instead of smooth threads, and the pyramid loses its shape.
“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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