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Dessert

Peanut Bar

A hard candy made from sugar and roasted peanuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Peanut Bar

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the sugar

  1. Combine sugar and cream of tartar in a large pot.

  2. Cook until the mixture reaches the hard crack stage.

  3. Remove from heat, close the damper, and cover the fire with ashes or a little fresh coke.

  4. Return the pot to the heat.

Mix, shape and cut

  1. Gently stir in the roasted peanuts until fully mixed with the sugar.

  2. Pour the mixture onto a slab, spreading it between bars.

  3. When the mixture is cool enough to hold its shape, cut it into bars using a butcher knife and mallet on a cutting board.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + peanuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together490 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + peanuttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet, firm candy structure that sets as it cools.
Cream of tartar
Adds a little acidity that helps keep the sugar syrup smooth rather than grainy.
Roasted peanuts
Provide crunch, nutty flavour and bulk inside the set candy.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar to the hard crack stage. Hard crack is the temperature range where the syrup sets brittle. Stopping early leaves the bars soft and sticky, while going too far scorches the sugar and makes it bitter.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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