Name: Orange-Flower Sugar
Ingredients: 4 ounces candied orange-flowers; 1 pound loaf sugar

Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange-Flower Sugar

Ingredients

4 ounces candied orange-flowers
1 pound loaf sugar

Directions

Prepare

Pound the candied orange flowers with the loaf sugar until well combined.
Sift the mixture to remove any lumps.

Store

Store the sugar in a stoppered 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.

Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Candied orange-flowers: Supplies the orange blossom aroma and flavour that defines this sugar.
Loaf sugar: Makes up the bulk of the sugar, providing sweetness and the base that carries the flavour.

“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.