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Dessert

Barley-sugar

A candied sugar made with barley, water, egg white, lemon juice, and optional lemon essence, cooled and shaped into sticks or balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley-sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water. Heat until it begins to whiten and thicken.

  2. Add the egg white and lemon juice, then boil quickly until it reaches the desired consistency.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in lemon essence if using.

Shape and store

  1. Pour the mixture onto a lightly oiled marble slab or shallow dish.

  2. As it begins to harden at the edges, shape it into sticks, lozenges, or balls.

  3. If the mixture cools too quickly, place the vessel in a pan of warm water to liquefy it again.

  4. Store cooled sugar in dry canisters in a dry place to prevent moisture.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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, hard candy structure once the syrup cools.
Egg white
Helps stabilise the syrup and gives a clearer, smoother finished candy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps prevent sugar from crystallising and adds bright flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling to the desired consistency. Boiling too briefly leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overboiling makes it brittle or burnt. Sugar syrup hardens as its concentration rises, so timing the boil controls the final texture.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, butter. 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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