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Dessert

Orange-flower Pralines

A confection made by boiling orange flowers in sugar until the mixture becomes powdery.

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-flower Pralines

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the orange flowers and soak them in cold water.

Make the praline

  1. Clarify and boil the sugar until it reaches the toffee stage.

  2. Add the flowers to the sugar and stir with a spatula until the sugar regains the souffle stage.

  3. Remove the pan from the heat and continue stirring until the sugar separates from the flowers and becomes powdery.

  4. Spread the mixture on a tray to dry, then sift it to separate the sugar from the flowers.

Store

  1. Store the flowers in bottles; they will keep for twelve months if preserved in a dry place.

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

Fresh white orange flowers
Supply the orange blossom aroma that flavours the sugar.
Sugar
Forms the boiled sugar coating that turns powdery as it cools and dries.

The step that matters

Remove the pan from the heat and keep stirring until the sugar turns powdery. Sugar boiled to these stages crystallises as it cools and stirs. Stirring off the heat makes it grain and separate from the flowers, rather than setting into a hard mass.

“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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