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Dessert

Orange Flower Tablets

A confection of sugar and orange flowers boiled to a crystalline stage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Flower Tablets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clarify the sugar.

  2. Cut the orange flowers into small pieces.

  3. Wet the cut orange flowers with lemon juice.

Cook the sugar

  1. Boil the clarified sugar until it reaches the large feather stage.

  2. Add the orange flowers to the boiling sugar.

  3. Boil again until it reaches the same stage.

  4. Remove the pan from the heat.

  5. Let the mixture rest for a few minutes.

Form the tablets

  1. Work the mixture with a spatula.

  2. Rub the mixture around the edges of the pan.

  3. When a bright icy appearance forms on the surface, stir the middle and pour it into a paper case.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Double refined sugar
Forms the sweet crystalline body of the tablets as it cooks to a syrup and recrystallises.
Orange flowers
Provide the characteristic aroma and flavour of the tablets.

The step that matters

Working the mixture at the feather stage. Sugar syrup is cooked to a specific concentration, and removing it from the heat and then agitating it triggers rapid crystallisation. Stirring or rubbing too early or too late can leave the mass either runny or set into a hard, grainy block instead of a smooth, opaque tablet.

“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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