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Dessert

Barlet Sugar

A sugar confection made by clarifying sugar, adding lemon juice and essence, boiling, cooling, and cutting 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 ↓

Barlet Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. Clarify the sugar until it reaches a cracky consistency.

  2. Add lemon juice and lemon essence, then boil once or twice.

  3. 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 and cut into long strips with scissors, twisting them slightly.

  3. For drops, use a ladle with a fine lip to drop onto a greased surface, ensuring they are no larger than a shilling.

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

  5. For ginger barley sugar, substitute lemon essence with strong essence of ginger.

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, brittle structure that gives barley sugar its crack when it sets.
Lemon juice
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sugar.
Lemon essence
Contributes a concentrated lemon aroma to the finished sweets.

The step that matters

Clarify the sugar to a cracky consistency. Sugar must be heated to the hard-crack stage so that, once cooled, it sets hard and brittle rather than sticky. Underheating leaves it soft and tacky, while overheating can scorch it and cause a bitter taste.

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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