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Dessert

Lemon Sponge Candy

A candied confection made from clarified sugar, egg white, sugar, lemon essence, and food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 Sponge Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Put clarified sugar into a saucepan and boil until pale yellow crack stage.

  2. While sugar is boiling, mix half of the egg white with sifted sugar and lemon essence.

  3. Add this mixture to the boiling sugar and stir briskly with a wooden spoon.

Set and cut

  1. Pour the mixture into paper-lined molds or tins dusted with sugar, or onto a slab.

  2. Cut into pieces.

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

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Clarified sugar
Forms the brittle candy structure as it cooks to the crack stage.
Egg white
Adds airiness and lightness to the candy as it is stirred into the hot sugar.

The step that matters

Adding the egg white mixture to the boiling sugar. Stirring briskly while the sugar is very hot helps the egg white mix in evenly and aerate the candy. Adding it too early or too cool can leave uneven texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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