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Candied Lemon-peel

Candied lemon peel is made by boiling lemon peels in a sugar syrup until reduced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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-peel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the lemons, removing all the inner pulp, and cut them into halves or quarters.

Make the candy

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water to create a strong syrup.

  2. Add the lemon peels to the syrup and boil until the syrup is nearly reduced.

  3. Remove the peels from the syrup and place them to dry with the outer peel facing down.

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 + 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

White sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the peel and preserves it as it cooks down.
Lemons
Supply the peel, whose bitter oils and fragrance flavour the candy.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it forms a syrup the peel can absorb.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup is nearly reduced. As water evaporates, the sugar concentration rises and the peel absorbs the syrup. Stopping too early leaves it wet and loosely sweet, while overcooking can crystallise the sugar or scorch it.

“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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