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Barley Sugar

A candied sugar made by clarifying sugar to crack stage, flavored with lemon, then cut into strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Barley Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. Clarify the sugar until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Add lemon juice and lemon essence.

  3. Let it boil once or twice.

  4. Set aside for a few minutes.

Shape and store

  1. Grease a marble slab or large slate with almond oil.

  2. Pour the sugar onto the slab.

  3. Cut it into long strips with scissors, twisting them slightly.

  4. Once cold, store in tin boxes or canisters.

  5. For drops, use a ladle with a fine lip to pour onto the greased marble or a sheet of sifted sugar.

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 + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. 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

Sugar
Forms the glassy, hard candy structure as it is heated and then cooled.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the candy.

The step that matters

Clarify the sugar until it reaches the crack stage. Sugar must be cooked to the crack stage so that, once cooled, it sets hard and brittle rather than sticky. Under-cooking leaves a soft, tacky candy that will not hold its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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