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Mint Drops

A hard candy made by cooking sugar to soft ball stage, flavored with peppermint oil, and dropped onto tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mint Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve sugar and cream of tartar in water and cook to a soft ball stage.

  2. Pour syrup into a dropper or lip pan until it is about half full.

Granulate and flavor

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of pulverized sugar to the dropper.

  2. Rub the sides of the dropper with a small paddle.

  3. Stir until the mixture granulates to a whitish mass.

  4. Stir in a few drops of oil of peppermint.

Drop and shape

  1. Hold the dropper over a sheet of tin.

  2. Dip the dropper to let the syrup run out onto the tin.

  3. Cut or scrape the syrup into drops using a wire or knitting needle.

  4. Repeat the process until the dropper is empty.

  5. Refill the dropper and continue.

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 + pepperminttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together632 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + pepperminttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,082 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 candy mass, which crystallizes into the granular, opaque texture.
Cream of tartar
Acid that interferes with large sugar crystal formation, keeping the syrup smooth.
Pulverized sugar
Provides seed crystals that trigger rapid granulation when the syrup is stirred.
Oil of peppermint
Adds the mint aroma and flavor to the finished drops.

The step that matters

Stirring until the mixture granulates. Rubbing the dropper and stirring in powdered sugar seed the syrup so it crystallizes into a whitish mass. Stirring too little leaves it glassy and runny, while stirring too long can make it too stiff to drop cleanly.

Swap the peppermint

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Peppermintthe 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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