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Dessert

Barley Sugar Drops

A candy made by dissolving sugar in water, adding egg white, boiling until clear, and straining into a bottle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Barley Sugar Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Break the sugar into bits and place it in a clean, well-tinned stew pan with the cold spring water.

  2. Set the pan over moderate heat and stir until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Beat the egg white and add it to the sugar mixture before it warms up, stirring well.

  4. Watch the mixture and remove any foam when it begins to boil.

  5. Keep boiling until no steam rises and the mixture is perfectly clear.

Strain and store

  1. Strain the mixture through a clean napkin and pour it into a close-stopped bottle.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Double refined sugar
Forms the sweet, glassy base that sets clear and firm as the syrup cools.
Egg white
Binds with impurities so they rise as foam, which can then be skimmed off to clarify the syrup.

The step that matters

Removing the foam and boiling until clear. Impurities rise to the surface as foam when the mixture begins to boil. Skimming them off while boiling until no steam rises leaves a clear syrup; leaving foam in gives a cloudy result.

“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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