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Dessert

Barley Sugar Drops

Barley sugar drops are a hard candy made from sugar, glucose, and lemon oil, cooled and cut into small pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 538 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Barley 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 syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a large pan.

  2. Heat over medium, stirring occasionally until sugar dissolves.

  3. Add glucose (or ½ oz cream of tartar, but not both).

  4. Cover the pan and let it boil for about 10 minutes.

  5. Remove the cover and insert a thermometer into the boiling liquid.

  6. Boil until it reaches 300°F (the hard crack stage).

  7. Add saffron coloring.

Shape the drops

  1. Pour the mixture onto an oiled pouring plate.

  2. Sprinkle a few drops of lemon oil over the mixture.

  3. As it cools, turn the edges and knead the mixture when it is cool enough to handle. Work quickly to prevent it from hardening.

  4. Cut off small pieces and pass them through a barley sugar machine.

  5. Once cool, break them up and shake in a sieve to remove scraps.

  6. The drops are now ready for bottling.

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 + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + saffrontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

White sugar
Forms the main body of the candy and sets into a hard, glassy structure as it cools.
Glucose
Inhibits crystallization, keeping the candy smooth and clear rather than grainy.
Lemon oil
Provides the main citrus aroma and flavor of the drops.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be heated evenly into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boil to 300°F (hard crack stage). Stopping short leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overheating turns it brittle or bitter. The thermometer reading is what sets the final texture, so it should be checked closely.

Swap the saffron

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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