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Barley Sugar

Barley sugar is a candied barley syrup made by simmering barley with lemon rind, sugar, and lemon juice until it reaches the great crack.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the barley water

  1. Pour cold water over barley and add lemon rind.

  2. Simmer for 2 hours, then let it stand and pour off the clear liquid.

Make the sweets

  1. Dissolve sugar in the barley water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add lemon juice and re-boil until it reaches the "great crack".

  3. Add essence of lemon, pour onto an oiled marble slab, and cut into strips.

  4. Twist each strip in your hands and pack in air-tight tins when cool.

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. Barley + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Cane loaf sugar
Forms the sweet, glassy body of the sweets as it cooks to hard crack.
Barley
Simmered to make the barley water, giving the base liquid its mild body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the sugar from crystallising.

The step that matters

Re-boiling to the "great crack" stage. Sugar must reach the hard-crack temperature so that, once cooled, the sweets set hard and glassy. Stopping early leaves them sticky, while overcooking makes them bitter and brittle. Lemon juice in the boil helps prevent crystallisation.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar. 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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