Skip to main content
Dessert

Barlet Sugar Drops

Sugar drops flavored with lemon rind, boiled to hard crack stage, rolled in sifted sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Barlet Sugar Drops

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the sugar drops

  1. Clarify and boil the sugar until it reaches the hard crack stage (300°F/150°C).

  2. Add the thinly pared rind of one or two 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 small squares of paper, twisting 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 hard, glassy candy structure when boiled to the hard crack stage.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright citrus aroma that infuses the boiling sugar.

The step that matters

Boiling to the hard crack stage. Sugar must reach about 300°F/150°C so that, once cooled, it sets hard and glassy rather than sticky. Undercooked sugar stays soft and tacky, while overcooked sugar can darken and taste bitter.

“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