Name: Orange-Flower Candy Tablets
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon loaf sugar; 1 tablespoon orange-flower water; a few drops acetic acid

Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 Candy Tablets

Ingredients

1 tablespoon loaf sugar
1 tablespoon orange-flower water
a few drops acetic acid

Directions

Prepare

Slightly oil small moulds or a tin pan marked with small tablets.
Pour the sugar into the moulds.

Dry

Place the moulds in a screen to dry for at least 30 minutes.
No coloring is needed.

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.

Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Loaf sugar: Forms the solid body of each tablet as it sets and dries.
Orange-flower water: Adds the characteristic floral aroma to the tablets.
Acetic acid: Adds a slight sharpness that balances the sweetness of the sugar.

“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.