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Dessert

Lemon Drops

A candied lemon drop made by mixing lemon juice and powdered sugar, cooking, and dropping onto paper to cool.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lemon Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a dish.

  2. Pound the lump sugar very fine and sift it through a fine sieve.

  3. Mix the powdered sugar with the lemon juice until very stiff.

Cook and set

  1. Put the mixture into a saucepan and stir over the heat for 5 minutes.

  2. Drop teaspoonfuls onto writing paper and let them cool.

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 + 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

Lump sugar
Provides sweetness and, dissolved and cooked, forms the firm body of the drops as it sets.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity and moisture that combine with the sugar to form the mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring over the heat for 5 minutes. Heating the stiff sugar and juice mixture drives off moisture and lets the sugar concentrate, so the drops can cool and harden. Stirring keeps the mixture from scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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