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Dessert

Barley Sugar

Barley sugar is a candy made by boiling barley syrup until caramelized and poured onto a greased marble surface.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon 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

Prepare and cook

  1. In a buttered saucepan, boil the syrup until it reaches caramel stage. Remove any scum that forms on the surface.

  2. Prepare a marble surface by greasing it with butter or oil.

Pour and shape

  1. Pour the syrup onto the marble in long sticks of desired thickness.

  2. Twist each end of the sticks while hot and let them cool until hard.

Add flavor

  1. For flavor, boil the rasped lemon rind in the syrup before pouring.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Syrup + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Syrup
Forms the sugar base that cooks to caramel and sets hard and glassy as it cools.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright citrus aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to caramel stage. Sugar syrup must reach the caramel stage to set hard when cooled. Stopping early leaves the candy soft and sticky, while cooking too long can darken it and make it taste bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, 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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