Skip to main content
Dessert

Barley Sugar Drops

A sweet confection made from boiled barley sugar and lemon rind, dropped onto a marble surface and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Barley and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Sugar Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the drops

  1. Boil the barley sugar until ready.

  2. Add the rasped rind of 1 or 2 lemons to the boiling mixture.

  3. Drop the syrup onto a marble surface in small round drops, about the size of a shilling.

  4. Let the drops cool completely.

Store

  1. Once cooled, store them in paper, dusting with powdered sugar as you remove them from the marble.

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. Barley + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

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

Barley sugar
Forms the clear, hard candy base once boiled into syrup.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus flavour to the boiled sugar.
Powdered sugar
Dusted on the drops so they do not stick together or to the paper.

The step that matters

Drop the syrup onto the marble. Syrup must be hot and at the right thickness so the drops hold a round shape and set without spreading. Cooling completely before handling keeps the drops firm and stops them sticking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes