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Dessert

Lemon Candy

A hard lemon-flavored candy made by boiling sugar and water, clarifying with vinegar, and setting in tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Lemon Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil slowly for 30 minutes.

  3. Clear the mixture with a little hot vinegar.

  4. Test the candy by dropping a small amount into cold water; it should be brittle.

  5. Once ready, flavor the mixture strongly with lemon.

Set and cut

  1. Pour the mixture into buttered tins.

  2. When cool, mark off into squares.

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 + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  3. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 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 firm and brittle as the syrup cools.
Vinegar
Helps clear the syrup by breaking down sugar crystals so the candy stays clear.
Lemon flavoring
Provides the strong lemon aroma and taste that defines the candy.

The step that matters

Test the candy in cold water. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration to set brittle. Underboiled syrup stays sticky and soft, while overboiled syrup can turn bitter or hard to bite. The cold-water drop shows whether the stage has been reached.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar. 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.

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