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Barley-sugar

Barley Sugar is a candied sugar confection made by boiling sugar with water, egg white, lemon juice, and optional lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Barley-sugar

Oven, in the book's wordsA very gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine 3 pounds of sugar and 1¼ pints of spring water.

  2. Add enough egg white to clarify the mixture as directed in previous instructions.

  3. Boil the mixture quickly until it thickens and begins to whiten.

  4. Stir in 2 teaspoons of fresh lemon juice and boil for a moment longer.

  5. Remove from heat and add a few drops of essence of lemon if desired.

Shape and set

  1. Pour the mixture onto a lightly oiled marble slab or shallow dish.

  2. When it starts to harden at the edges, shape it into sticks, lozenges, or balls.

  3. If it cools too quickly, place the vessel in a pan of water and gently reheat.

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 bulk of the candy and sets into a hard, glassy structure as it cools.
Egg white
Helps clarify the syrup, binding impurities so they can be skimmed off for a clear result.
Fresh lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps prevent sugar from recrystallising, keeping the candy smooth.

The step that matters

Boiling until it thickens and begins to whiten. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration to set hard when cooled. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns bitter or brittle, so timing matters.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. 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

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