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Dessert

Patience Candy

A caramel candy with pecans, made by boiling sugar, milk, and butter until hard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Patience Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Combine 1 cup of sugar in a saucepan and stir until it melts and browns.

  2. Add 1 cup of milk and stir until the caramel dissolves.

  3. Stir in the remaining sugar, milk, and butter.

Cook and set

  1. Boil until it forms a hard ball when dropped into cold water.

  2. Add the pecans.

  3. Remove from heat and stir until it begins to grain.

  4. Pour into a greased square pan.

  5. When cool, cut into blocks.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Melts and browns to form the caramel base and, once cooked, the candy's firm body.
Milk
Dissolves the caramel and adds creaminess and softness to the finished candy.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother texture and richer flavor.
Pecan meats
Add crunch and nutty flavor throughout the candy.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and stir until it begins to grain. Stirring after the boil controls sugar crystallization. Pulling it off heat at the right moment and stirring until it turns opaque and grainy gives the candy its fine, creamy texture rather than a hard, glassy one.

“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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