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Dessert

Gum Pastilles, or Jujubes

A candy made from gum arabic, sugar, orange‑flower water, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Gum Pastilles, or Jujubes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gum

  1. Soak the gum arabic in tepid water, then strain it clean.

  2. In a sugar boiler, combine the soaked gum and sugar.

Cook and finish

  1. Stir over moderate heat until it boils and reduces to a small pearl degree.

  2. Add the orange-flower water and stir together on the heat.

  3. Remove from the stove and skim off the froth.

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

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Gum arabic
Forms the gel that gives jujubes their chewy, firm body as the syrup cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the candy and, as it cooks down, helps set the texture.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma to the finished candy.

The step that matters

Reducing to a small pearl. Cooking the syrup to the small pearl stage concentrates the sugar enough for the gum to set into a chewy gel once cooled. Undercooking leaves it soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle.

“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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