Skip to main content
Dessert

Lime Juice Deops

A sweet candy made from sugar, lime juice, tartaric acid, and green coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lime and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lime Juice Deops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Cook sugar and cream of tartar (or glucose) until just before it turns yellow, washing down the sides of the basin.

  2. Pour the mixture onto an oiled or greased slab.

Flavor and shape

  1. Form tartaric acid into a paste with a few drops of lime juice and mix it into the batch.

  2. Add green color and oil of lime, then run through a drop machine to form thin round or square drops.

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. Lime + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Sugar
Forms the bulk of the candy and sets into a hard, glassy structure as it cools.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps keep the sugar from crystallizing, so the candy stays smooth.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp, sour acidity that balances the sweetness of the candy.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar to just before yellow. Cooking too far caramelizes the sugar, adding color and bitterness and changing the flavor. Stopping just short keeps the candy clear, mild and hard once cooled.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, lemon. 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