Skip to main content
Dessert

Cocoanut Taffy

A chewy candy made from sugar, coconut, glucose, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coconut and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,233 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cocoanut Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the taffy

  1. Melt the granulated and brown sugars in the water over medium heat.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add the glucose.

  3. Continue boiling until the temperature reaches 300°F (150°C).

  4. Lift the pan slightly from the heat and gently stir in the desiccated coconut.

  5. Boil until well mixed, then add a few drops of lemon flavoring.

Set

  1. Pour the mixture into frames to 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. Coconut + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Granulated sugar
Provides sweetness and the bulk of the sugar structure that sets as the taffy cools.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavor to the taffy.
Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallization, keeping the taffy smooth and preventing it from turning grainy.
Desiccated coconut
Adds coconut flavor, texture and bulk to the set taffy.

The step that matters

Boiling to 300°F (150°C). Sugar syrup must reach the hard-crack stage to set firm when cooled. Undercooked syrup stays soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it brittle and possibly scorched.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes