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Dessert

Maple Sugar Candy

A candy made by boiling maple syrup with vinegar, optionally adding nuts or flavorings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Maple syrup and nuts work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 67 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Candy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the maple syrup until it thickens.

  2. Add ½ cup vinegar for every 2 quarts of syrup.

  3. Continue boiling until the candy reaches a thick consistency.

  4. Pour the candy out onto a surface.

  5. Drop in nuts or add flavorings as desired.

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. Maple syrup + nutstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Maple syrup + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Vinegar + nutstop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Maple syrup
Provides the sugar that thickens on boiling and sets into candy, along with its flavor.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps keep the sugar from crystallizing too readily, so the candy stays smoother.

The step that matters

Continue boiling until the candy reaches a thick consistency.. Sugar concentration determines the final texture. Stopping early leaves the candy soft and sticky, while boiling too long makes it hard and prone to graining. The syrup thickens noticeably as its water evaporates, so judging by the stated consistency matters.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (maple syrup, vinegar):

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against maple syrup, vinegar. 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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