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Dessert

Candied Lemon or Peppermint for Colds

A candy made by boiling sugar with water and essence, then cooling and cutting.

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

Candied Lemon or Peppermint for Colds

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar in water until it begins to candy around the sides.

  2. Add essence and pour the mixture onto buttered paper.

  3. Cut into pieces with a knife once cooled.

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

Sugar
Forms the body of the candy and sets firm as the boiled syrup cools.
Essence
Gives the candy its lemon or peppermint aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Boil until the sugar begins to candy around the sides. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar. Stopping too early leaves a soft, sticky candy, while boiling too long makes it hard, brittle, or prone to burning.

“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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