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Dessert

Barley Sugar

Barley sugar is a brittle candy made by boiling sugar, water, egg white, and lemon essence until clear, then cooling on a buttered dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Barley Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water.

  2. Heat over medium until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Add the beaten egg white.

  4. Stir well before the mixture warms.

  5. Once boiling, remove any scum that rises.

  6. Continue boiling until the syrup is clear.

  7. Strain the syrup through muslin.

  8. Return the strained syrup to the saucepan.

  9. Boil until it reaches a brittle stage.

  10. Add a little lime juice or essence for flavor.

  11. Let it stand for 1-2 minutes.

Set and cut

  1. Prepare a large dish greased with malted butter.

  2. Pour the sugar onto the dish.

  3. Cut into strips.

  4. Allow 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).

  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

Sugar
Forms the sweet, glassy structure that sets as the syrup cools and hardens.
Egg white
Helps clarify the syrup by collecting scum that is then removed during boiling.

The step that matters

Boil until it reaches a brittle stage. Sugar syrup hardens as its temperature rises and water evaporates. Stopping too early leaves a sticky candy that will not set firm, while boiling too long can scorch the sugar and turn it bitter.

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.

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