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Dessert

Lemon Drops

A sweet lemon candy made by dissolving powdered sugar in lemon juice, boiling to thick syrup, and dropping onto plates to harden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Drops

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour enough lemon juice over the powdered sugar to dissolve it.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches the consistency of thick syrup.

  3. Drop spoonfuls onto plates and place in a warm area to harden.

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

Powdered sugar
Forms the sweet bulk of the drops and hardens into a candy-like texture as it cools.
Lemon juice
Dissolves the sugar and adds tart acidity that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling to thick syrup. Sugar hardens based on how concentrated the syrup is. Boiling too little leaves drops that stay soft and sticky, while boiling too long makes them brittle and hard to drop cleanly. Stop once the syrup reaches the stated thickness.

“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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