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Dessert

Orange Wafers

A sweet treat made from orange rind, juice, lemon juice, and powdered sugar, dried on wafer paper.

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 Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Rasp the rind of the oranges finely.

  2. Cut the oranges in half and squeeze them into a small pan.

  3. Squeeze the lemons into the pan with the orange juice and rind.

Make and dry the wafers

  1. Add enough powdered sugar to achieve a thick consistency, similar to lemon wafers.

  2. Dry the mixture using wafer paper.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

China oranges
Provide the main juice and fragrant oil from the rind for flavour.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the citrus flavour and balances the sweetness.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the juice and thickens it into a firm mixture that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Adding the powdered sugar. Powdered sugar dissolves into the citrus juice and stiffens it as the mixture thickens. Adding it gradually lets you stop at the right consistency, since too little leaves the mixture runny and too much makes it hard to dry into thin wafers.

“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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