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Dessert

Ice Cream Candy

A candied sugar confection flavored with lemon, made by boiling sugar, butter, water, and lemon peel, then cooling and shaping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ice Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil the sugar, butter, water, and lemon peel together until it becomes crisp when dropped into cold water.

  2. Set aside until boiling ceases, then stir in the lemon juice.

  3. Butter a dish and pour in the mixture to about 1 inch thick.

Finish and shape

  1. Once cool, remove the lemon peel, pull the candy until white, and shape as desired.

  2. If you don't have lemon, use 2 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 teaspoons of extract instead.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Coffee + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Moist white coffee sugar
Forms the candy base and sets into a brittle, sweet mass as it cools.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the texture and gives a richer mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the candy.

The step that matters

Boil until crisp in cold water. Sugar must reach the hard-crack stage to set brittle rather than sticky. Stopping too early leaves a soft, tacky candy that will not hold its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar, butter. 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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