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Dessert

Orange-Flower Tablets

A candy made by boiling sugar with orange flowers and lemon juice.

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 and boil 2 pounds of double-refined sugar until it reaches the large feather stage.

  2. Cut ½ pound of picked orange flowers into small pieces and wet them with lemon juice to preserve their whiteness.

Make the tablets

  1. Add the orange flowers to the boiling sugar and boil again to the same stage.

  2. Remove the pan from the heat and let the mixture rest for a few minutes.

  3. Work the mixture with a spatula, rubbing it around the edges of the pan.

  4. When the surface appears bright and icy, stir the middle and pour it into a paper formed as a large 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 sugar syrup base that sets into the firm, crisp tablet structure.
Orange flowers
Provide the orange aroma that flavours the finished tablets.

The step that matters

Working the mixture as it cools. Rubbing the mixture around the pan edges and stirring the middle at the right moment encourages even sugar crystallisation. If it is stirred too early or too late, the mass may set unevenly or become grainy instead of smooth and icy.

“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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