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Dessert

To Candy Lemon Peels

A preserved lemon peel sweetened with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

To Candy Lemon Peels

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peels

  1. Boil the lemon peels until very tender, changing the water until it no longer tastes salty, about 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Strain the water from the peels when they are tender.

Candy the peels

  1. In a preserving kettle, lay the peels and cover them with enough water.

  2. Add 1 pound of granulated sugar for each pint of water.

  3. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the peels are clear. Watch closely as the syrup reduces to avoid burning.

Dry and finish

  1. Lift each piece out and lay it on a dish sprinkled with granulated sugar, covering them thickly with sugar.

  2. Place in a cool oven until dry, or dip each piece into boiled sugar syrup and lay on an oiled dish to dry.

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

Lemon peels
Provide the main body and bitter aromatic flavour of the candied peel.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as a concentrated syrup, replaces its water to preserve it.

The step that matters

Watch the syrup as it reduces. As water evaporates, sugar concentrates and the syrup can darken and burn quickly. Burnt sugar turns bitter and spoils the flavour of the peel, so it needs close attention near the end of simmering.

“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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