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Dessert

Lemon or Rock Candy

A hard-sugar candy flavored with lemon, made by boiling sugar and water to hard crack stage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Lemon or Rock Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Dissolve the sugar

  1. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Heat over low heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Add a little vinegar or cream of tartar.

  4. Remove any scum that forms on the surface.

Boil and set

  1. Boil the mixture until it reaches a hard crack stage, where it snaps like glass.

  2. If desired, add nuts before cooling.

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 + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + nutstop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Forms the candy's structure; boiling concentrates it until it sets hard and glassy as it cools.
Vinegar or cream of tartar
Adds acidity that helps stop the sugar from crystallizing, keeping the candy smooth and clear.

The step that matters

Boil to the hard crack stage. Sugar must be boiled until little water remains. Stopping early leaves a sticky, soft candy that will not set firm; cooking too far can scorch the sugar, giving a bitter, burnt flavour.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Soybeanfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar. 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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