Skip to main content
Dessert

Barley Sugar

A candied sugar made by boiling sugar, water, and egg white until crack stage, then flavored with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Combine sugar, water, and egg white in a well-tinned saucepan.

  2. Mix well and bring to a boil, skimming carefully.

  3. Once the scum ceases to rise, strain the mixture through muslin.

  4. Return to the pan and boil until it reaches the crack stage.

Finish and shape

  1. Remove from heat, add lemon juice, and let it stand for a minute.

  2. Pour onto an oiled dish and cut into strips or small squares before it hardens.

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 brittle, glassy candy once the syrup is boiled to the crack stage.
Egg white
Its proteins rise to the surface as scum, which skimming removes to clarify the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps prevent the sugar from recrystallising into grainy candy.

The step that matters

Boiling to the crack stage. Sugar must reach the correct temperature to set hard and brittle when cooled. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns bitter and dark.

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.

More barley sugar recipes

Drops 9 See all 69 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes