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Dessert

Almond Taffy

A sweet confection made from boiled sugar, butter, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Almond Taffy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the water and brown sugar together for 10 minutes.

  2. Blanch and slice the almonds in half.

  3. Stir the almonds and butter into the syrup.

  4. Let it boil hard for another 10 minutes.

  5. Pour the mixture onto a well-buttered dish 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. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Forms the syrup base that sets into the taffy's chewy, sweet body as it cools.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the taffy a softer, richer texture and smoother bite.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and crunch throughout the cooled taffy.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup hard for the second 10 minutes. The syrup must reach a high enough sugar concentration to set firm when cooled. Boiling too briefly leaves the taffy soft and sticky, while boiling too long can make it hard or scorched.

“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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