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Dessert

Lemon Drops

A lemon candy made by mixing lemon juice and sugar, cooking, and dropping onto paper to cool.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sugar and juice

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Pound and sift the sugar through a fine sieve until very fine.

Make the drops

  1. Mix the sugar with the lemon juice until thick and difficult to stir.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a copper saucepan and stir over low heat for 5 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and drop spoonfuls onto writing paper using a knife.

  4. Let them cool until they can be removed from the paper.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Sugar
Forms the sweet, firm body of the drops as it thickens and then sets on cooling.
Lemon juice
Provides the acidity and flavour, and helps the sugar thicken into a mass.

The step that matters

Stirring over low heat. Sugar mixed with acidic juice can crystallise or scorch if heated too fast. Gentle, steady heat keeps the mixture smooth and lets it thicken evenly before it is dropped.

“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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