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Dessert

To Make Barley-sugar

Barley sugar is a brittle sweet made by boiling sugar with water, egg white, lemon juice, and lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Isabella Beeton · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 2 ingredients
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To Make Barley-sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Put the sugar into a well-tinned saucepan with the water, and when the sugar dissolves, set it over a moderate fire, adding the well-beaten egg before the mixture gets warm, and stir it well together.

  2. When it boils, remove the scum as it rises, and keep it boiling until no more appears, and the syrup looks perfectly clear; then strain it through a fine sieve or muslin bag, and put it back into the saucepan.

  3. Boil it again like caramel, until it is brittle, when a little is dropped in a basin of cold water: it is then sufficiently boiled.

Flavour and shape

  1. Add a little lemon juice and a few drops of essence of lemon, and let it stand for a minute or two.

  2. Have ready a marble slab or large dish, rubbed over with salad oil; pour on it the sugar, and cut it into strips with a pair of scissors: these strips should then be twisted, and the barley-sugar stored away in a very dry place.

  3. It may be formed into lozenges or drops, by dropping the sugar in a very small quantity at a time onto the oiled slab or dish.

By Isabella Beeton. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Sugar (in the method)
Forms the sweet, clear, brittle glass when boiled to the hard-crack stage.
Egg (in the method)
Its protein rises with the impurities as scum, which is skimmed off to clear the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling to brittle. Sugar syrup must be boiled until hot enough to set hard when cooled. Stopping early leaves a sticky, soft sweet; boiling too long can scorch it and turn it bitter.

“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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