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Dessert

Turkish Delight

A gelatinous sweet made from sugar, water, gelatine, lemon flavor, colored with cochineal, rolled in icing sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Turkish Delight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of cold water for 2 to 3 hours.

Make the sweet

  1. Boil the loaf sugar with 1 cup of water for 20 minutes.

  2. Pour the sugar mixture over the soaked gelatine.

  3. Color with Cochineal and flavor with plenty of lemon to mask the taste of gelatine.

Set and finish

  1. Pour the mixture into a basin and let it sit until the next day.

  2. Cut into squares and roll in icing sugar.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, chewy gel as it cools.
Loaf sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and helps the candy stay soft and tender.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma to balance the sweetness and mask the taste of gelatine.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine fully before combining. Gelatine must hydrate in cold water before it is mixed into hot sugar syrup; otherwise it clumps and does not dissolve evenly, so the set will be uneven.

“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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