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Orange, Seville, Paste for Dessert

A sweet paste made from boiled Seville orange rinds and powdered sugar, shaped and baked until dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Orange, Seville, Paste for Dessert

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very slow oven”. The 300°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the paste

  1. Remove the yellow rind from the Seville oranges, avoiding the white skin.

  2. Boil the rinds in water until tender.

  3. Drain the rinds on an inverted sieve and pound them in a mortar with powdered sugar until smooth.

Shape and dry

  1. Roll the paste to ¼ inch thick and cut into shapes with a pastry cutter.

  2. Place the shapes on buttered paper in a slow oven (300°F / 150°C).

  3. When dry on one side, turn them to dry the other side.

Store

  1. Store in a tin box between sheets of writing paper in a warm 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Orange + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Seville oranges
Provide the yellow rind, which becomes the flavourful paste base.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps bind it into a smooth, workable mass.

The step that matters

Pounding the rinds until smooth. Thorough pounding breaks the cooked rind into a fine, even paste. Lumps left behind can make the shapes crumble or dry unevenly.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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