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Dessert

Orange-Flower Tablets

A sweet tablet made from orange flowers, lemon juice, and sugar.

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. Cut the orange flowers into small pieces and wet them with lemon juice to preserve their whiteness.

  2. Add the flowers to the sugar and boil until the desired consistency is reached.

Make the tablets

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

  2. Stir the mixture with a spatula, rubbing it around the edges of the pan until it has a bright, icy appearance.

  3. Stir the center and pour the mixture into a paper-lined case.

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

  5. Once cooled, break into pieces along the marked lines.

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

Orange flowers
Provide the characteristic floral aroma that flavors the finished tablets.
Sugar
Forms the crystalline body of the tablets as it boils and sets on cooling.
Lemon juice
Acidity helps keep the flowers white during preparation.

The step that matters

Stirring the mixture at the edges until it turns bright and icy. Stirring against the pan edges encourages sugar to crystallize, giving a opaque, matte-white set instead of a clear glassy one. Stop once the surface looks right, since overworking can make the mass grainy or hard to pour.

“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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