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Dessert

Maple Sugar Candy

A hard candy made from maple sugar, cream of tartar, and water, boiled until it hardens.

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 ↓

Maple Sugar Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Break up the maple sugar.

  2. Add the maple sugar and cream of tartar to 2 cups of water.

  3. Boil the syrup.

  4. When it boils, add 1 spoonful of cold water.

  5. Remove from heat.

  6. Skim off impurities. Continue skimming until no impurities rise.

Cook and shape

  1. Boil until it hardens in cold water.

  2. Pour into buttered pans to cool.

  3. When partly cool, pull like molasses candy until light and crisp.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Maple sugar
Provides the sweetness and the maple flavor that the candy is built on.
Cream of tartar
Acidity helps keep the sugar smooth and prevents it from crystallizing grainy.

The step that matters

Skim off impurities completely. Impurities left in the syrup can form crystals or cloudiness in the finished candy. Skimming until none rise gives a clean, smooth texture.

“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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