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Dessert

Turkish Delights

Turkish Delights are sweet confections made from sugar, water, starch, almonds, and flavored with fruit extracts, then coated in powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and rose are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,465 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Turkish Delights

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar with water until clear.

  2. Add the dissolved starch and stir until it becomes a thick paste.

Flavor and set

  1. Mix in the additional water and chopped almonds.

  2. Flavor with extract.

  3. Pour the mixture into oiled pans, 1 inch deep.

  4. Once cold, cut into squares.

  5. Dip each square in powdered sugar.

  6. Store in tin boxes.

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. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Forms the sweet, firm body of the candy as the syrup cooks and sets.
Starch
Thickens the syrup into a paste so the candy sets soft and sliceable rather than runny.
Chopped almonds
Add texture and crunch within the soft gel.

The step that matters

Stir the starch into the syrup until thick. Starch must be fully dissolved and stirred evenly while the syrup is hot, or it will clump and leave lumps or a grainy texture. Thorough stirring lets the starch gelatinize and thicken the mixture into a uniform, sliceable set.

“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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