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Dessert

Lemon Cream Candy

A candied lemon confection made by boiling sugar, water, lemon juice, and peel, then cooling and cutting 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 lemon juice

  1. Steep the grated peel of the lemon in the 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 heat until nearly dissolved.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Cook until it hardens in cold water.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice.

  5. Boil for 1 minute.

  6. Add the baking soda and mix well.

  7. Pour the mixture onto broad shallow dishes.

  8. Let it cool.

Shape and cut

  1. Pull into long ropes.

  2. Cut into lengths.

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

Best white sugar
Forms the bulk of the candy and sets firm as the syrup cooks and cools.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and gives the candy its lemon flavour.
Lemon peel
Infused into the juice to carry aromatic lemon oils into the candy.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot syrup to lighten its texture, making the candy less dense and easier to pull.

The step that matters

Cook until it hardens in cold water. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration to set firm but stay pullable. Undercooking leaves the candy sticky, while overcooking makes it brittle and hard to shape.

“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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