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Dessert

Orange-flower Candy

A sweet candy made from sugar, water, egg white, orange flower petals, and optional lemon peel, coconut, or nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Beat ¾ pint of water with ½ egg white in a bowl.

  2. Pour the mixture over 2 cups of sugar in lumps.

  3. Let the mixture sit for a short time.

  4. Place the mixture over a clear fire.

  5. Boil the mixture for a few minutes.

  6. Set the mixture aside until the scum subsides.

  7. Remove the scum from the mixture.

  8. Boil the syrup until it becomes very thick.

Make the candy

  1. Gradually add 3 ounces of orange flower petals.

  2. Stir until the mixture becomes candy.

  3. When a white mass forms in the pan, pour it into paper cases or drop it onto dishes.

  4. Sprinkle grated lemon peel, grated coconut, or pounded nuts over the candy, if desired.

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. Coconut + almondtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Helps form a foam that gathers and lifts impurities (scum) from the boiling sugar syrup.
Sugar
Forms the sweet syrup that boils down and sets into the candy mass.
Orange flower petals
Add the orange flower aroma that flavours the candy.

The step that matters

Removing the scum before boiling the syrup thick. Scum left in the syrup can cloud the candy and leave impurities in it. Letting the mixture settle and skimming it off first gives a clearer, cleaner result before the syrup is boiled down.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, orange, coconut, almond):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, orange, coconut, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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