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Dessert

Barley Sugar Drops

A confection of boiled sugar drops flavored with lemon rind, rolled in sifted loaf sugar and wrapped in paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the drops

  1. Clarify and boil the sugar until it becomes crisp when dipped in cold water.

  2. Add the thinly pared rind of the lemons while boiling.

  3. Drop the sugar onto a stone or marble slab in round drops.

Finish and store

  1. Once cool, roll the drops in sifted loaf sugar.

  2. Store them between layers of white paper or wrap in square paper and twist the ends.

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).

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, brittle candy structure when boiled to a hard crack stage.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oil flavour to the boiled sugar.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar until it turns crisp in cold water. Sugar must reach a high enough temperature to set hard when cooled. Stopping early leaves a soft, sticky drop that will not hold its shape or store well.

“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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