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Dessert

Orange-flower Candy

A candied confection made by steeping orange flowers in a boiled sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Orange-flower Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water, and boil gently for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the orange flowers to the boiling syrup and let them steep for 5 minutes.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and let it sit for 2 days.

  4. Boil the syrup again until it rises high in the pan.

Shape and store

  1. Strain the syrup onto sheets of paper placed on large flat dishes.

  2. Loosen the candy from the paper before it cools completely.

  3. Store the candy in canisters until needed; it will keep for several months.

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

Doubly-refined loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and, once boiled, the solid body of the candy.
Orange flowers
Infuse the syrup with their fragrant aroma during steeping.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup again until it rises high in the pan. Sugar syrup must reach a high enough concentration to set firm as it cools. Boiling too little leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overboiling can make it hard or scorch it.

“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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