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Dessert

Candied Lemon Peel

A preserved lemon peel sweetened and dried for use in desserts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Candied Lemon Peel

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Candied Lemon Peel

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the peel

  1. Make an incision around the middle of each lemon and remove the peel in halves.

  2. Remove most of the white part from the peel.

  3. Soak the peels in saltwater for 3 days.

  4. After 3 days, place the peels in fresh cold water.

  5. Soak the peels in fresh cold water for 24 hours.

Make the syrup and candy

  1. Put the peels in a pan.

  2. Cover the pan with cold water.

  3. Simmer gently until the peels can be pierced with a pin, but do not let them become flabby.

  4. Make a syrup with 1 lb of sugar for every pint of water.

  5. Drain the peels.

  6. Place the peels in a clean preserving pan covered with the syrup.

  7. Simmer until the peels become transparent.

  8. Make a second syrup with the remaining sugar and water.

  9. Drain the peels again.

  10. Simmer the peels in this second syrup until the sugar candies.

  11. Remove the peels.

Dry and store

  1. Lay the peels on a baking tin lined with kitchen paper.

  2. Place the tin in a cool oven to dry.

  3. Store the candied peels in biscuit tins for later use.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

Lemons
Provide the peel that is softened, candied and dried into the final sweet product.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as a concentrated syrup, candies it so it becomes transparent and preserved.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without letting the peels become flabby. Simmering softens the bitter peel so sugar can penetrate, but boiling hard or overcooking makes the peel limp and mushy, so it loses the firm texture needed for candying.

“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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