Skip to main content
Dessert

Barley Sugar

A candy made by boiling sugar, water, egg white, and lemon juice until it reaches candy height, then poured onto a slab and cut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Barley Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in water with the egg white.

  2. Boil until it reaches candy height.

  3. Add lemon juice and boil quickly until it returns to its previous condition.

Shape and set

  1. Pour onto a marble slab.

  2. Once stiff, cut into strips and twist.

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).

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Lump sugar
Forms the main body of the candy and, once boiled to a high concentration, sets hard and glassy.
Egg white
Rises to the surface as the syrup boils, carrying impurities that can then be skimmed away for clarity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that splits some sucrose into glucose and fructose, helping the candy resist graining.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup to candy height. The amount of water boiled off sets the sugar concentration. Too little boiling leaves the candy sticky and soft, while too much makes it brittle and prone to burning or crystallising.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

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

More barley sugar recipes

Drops 9 See all 69 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes