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Dessert

Orange Wafers

A sweet treat made from orange pulp and sugar, formed into thin wafers.

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 Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Cut the oranges in half.

  2. Remove the seeds and juice.

  3. Boil the orange halves in 3 or 4 changes of hot water until tender.

  4. Beat the boiled oranges to a pulp in a marble mortar.

  5. Strain the pulp through a fine sieve.

  6. For every 1 lb. of pulp, use 1 ½ lbs. of loaf sugar.

Make the paste

  1. Boil ½ of the sugar with the orange pulp until it becomes syrupy.

  2. Remove from heat and let it cool.

  3. Mix with the remaining sugar to form a paste.

Shape and dry

  1. Roll out the paste thinly on paper using a rolling pin.

  2. Cut into rounds with a glass.

  3. Let them dry until clear.

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

Best oranges
Provide the pulp that forms the body and flavor of the wafers.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pulp and, once boiled into syrup, helps bind it into a firm paste.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar with the pulp until syrupy. Sugar concentrates as water evaporates, and the syrup must reach the right thickness so the cooled paste rolls out thinly and dries clear rather than staying sticky or cracking.

“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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