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Dessert

Lemon Drops

A sweet confection made by dissolving powdered sugar in lemon juice, boiling to syrup, then 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

Make the syrup

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

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

Shape and set

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the syrup onto plates.

  2. Place the plates in a warm area to allow the drops 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
Provides the sweetness and the bulk that becomes the hard, candy-like drops.
Lemon juice
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup and adds the sharp, acidic flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling to thick syrup. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar. If the mixture is boiled too little, the drops stay soft and sticky. If it is boiled too long, the sugar can crystallise or over-harden. Stop when it looks like thick syrup.

“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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