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Dessert

Lemon-cream Candy

A sweet candy made from sugar, lemon juice, peel, baking soda, and water, boiled and set into ropes.

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-cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Steep the grated lemon peel in the lemon juice for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture, squeezing the cloth to extract all the juice.

Make the candy

  1. Pour the water over the sugar and stir until nearly dissolved.

  2. Heat the mixture over the fire and bring it to a boil.

  3. Stew steadily until it hardens in cold water.

  4. Stir in the lemon mixture and boil for 1 minute.

  5. Add the baking soda, stirring well.

  6. Immediately pour the mixture onto broad, shallow dishes.

Pull and cut

  1. Once cool enough to handle, pull it into long white ropes and cut into lengths when brittle.

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).

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

White sugar
Forms the bulk of the candy and, as it cooks down, sets into a firm, brittle mass.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and gives the candy its lemon flavour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot syrup to lighten its colour and texture, making it easier to pull and shape.

The step that matters

Stew steadily until it hardens in cold water. Sugar syrup must reach the hard-crack stage so the candy sets brittle rather than sticky. Pulling the candy too early or cooking it too little leaves it soft and tacky, while overcooking can scorch the sugar and give it a bitter taste.

“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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