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Dessert

Orange-Flower Tablets

A confection of sugar and orange flowers, boiled to a crystalline stage and cut into tablets.

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 the sugar

  1. Clarify and boil the sugar until it reaches the large feather stage.

  2. Cut the orange flowers into small pieces and wet them with lemon juice.

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

Make the tablets

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

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

  3. When the surface appears bright and icy, stir the middle with the spatula.

  4. Pour the mixture into a paper-lined case.

  5. Mark the cake with a knife to indicate the size of the tablets.

  6. Once cold, break into the marked pieces.

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 crystalline body of the tablets once boiled and worked to a set texture.
Orange flowers
Provide the characteristic aroma and flavour that the tablets are built around.
Lemon juice
Helps keep the mixture white by preventing the sugar from discolouring during boiling.

The step that matters

Working the mixture at the edges and surface. Stirring or rubbing the mixture as it cools encourages sugar to crystallise into a fine, opaque, icy texture. Stirring too early or too late can leave the mass grainy or runny, so the surface must look bright and icy before stirring the middle.

“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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