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Dessert

Everton Ice Cream Candy

A lemon-flavored candy made by boiling sugar, butter, water, and lemon rind, then cooling and pulling until white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Everton Ice Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the candy

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemon into a cup.

  2. In a saucepan, boil the sugar, butter, and water with half of the lemon rind until it becomes crisp when dropped in cold water.

  3. Set aside until boiling ceases, then stir in the lemon juice.

  4. Butter a dish and pour the mixture to a thickness of about 1 inch.

Pull and cut

  1. Once cool, remove the lemon peel and pull the candy until white.

  2. Cut into sticks, checking every 4 inches with a knife.

  3. Keep the heat high and stir the candy continuously.

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. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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 body of the candy as it cooks to a hard, brittle set.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer bite and a smoother, richer texture.
Lemon
Adds sharp acidity and fragrance that balance the sugar's sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking until crisp in cold water. Sugar candy sets according to how much water has boiled off. Stopping too early leaves it sticky and soft, while cooking too long makes it brittle and can scorch, so the cold-water test guides when to stop.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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