Skip to main content
Dessert

Candied Lemon Peel

A confection made by preserving lemon peel in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Candied Lemon Peel

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the peel

  1. Make an incision around half of each lemon and remove the peel carefully.

  2. Remove most of the white part from the peel.

  3. Soak the peeled segments in saltwater for 3 days.

  4. Soak the peels in fresh cold water for 24 hours.

  5. Place the peels in a pan, cover with cold water, and simmer gently until tender but not flabby.

Candy the peel

  1. Make a syrup with 1 lb of sugar and 1 pint of water.

  2. Drain the peels and place them in a clean preserving pan.

  3. Cover the peels with the syrup and simmer until they become transparent.

  4. Prepare a second syrup with the remaining sugar and water.

  5. Drain the peels again.

  6. Simmer until the sugar candies.

Dry and store

  1. Lay each piece of peel on a baking tin lined with kitchen paper and place in a cool oven to dry.

  2. Store in biscuit tins for later use.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Lemons
Provide the peel, which is cooked and candied into the finished sweet.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as it cooks into syrup, candies and preserves it.

The step that matters

Simmer the peel until tender but not flabby. Peel must be cooked enough to soften the bitter, tough pith and make it tender, yet not so long that the cell structure collapses into a limp, mushy texture. Careful timing keeps the peel firm enough to hold its shape through candying.

“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.

You might also like

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