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Dessert

Orange Biscuits

A dried biscuit made from powdered orange peel and sugar, formed into shapes and sun-dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar 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 ↓

Orange Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Boil the oranges, changing the water several times, until tender.

  2. Remove the oranges.

  3. Halve the oranges.

  4. Take out the pulp and juice.

  5. Dry the peel.

  6. Pound the peel in a mortar until powdered.

  7. Measure the orange powder.

Make the paste

  1. Use an equal amount of loaf sugar.

  2. Sift the sugar and orange powder together.

  3. Add the orange juice to make a paste.

  4. Spread the paste thinly on dishes.

Dry and store

  1. Dry it in the sun or before the fire.

  2. When half dry, shape into biscuits.

  3. Return to the sun until completely dry.

  4. Store in boxes with white paper between layers.

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

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

Orange and sugar 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

Medium sized oranges
Provide the peel, which is powdered to give the biscuits their flavour and bulk.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, mixed with the powder and juice, binds the paste that holds the biscuits together.

The step that matters

Dry the paste until only half dry before shaping. Shaping too early, while the paste is still wet, can make it lose its form; drying until firm but still slightly pliable lets the biscuits hold their shape before they finish drying completely.

“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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