Skip to main content
Dessert

Turkish Delight

A gelatinous confection made with sugar, water, citric acid, lemon and rose essences, rolled in icing sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and rose are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,174 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Turkish Delight

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 4 hours.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the soaked gelatine, boiling water, and sugar.

  3. Boil for twenty minutes, then remove from heat and add citric acid.

Flavor the two batches

  1. Divide the mixture into two portions; flavor one with lemon essence.

  2. Color the other pink with cochineal and flavor with rose essence.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixtures into dishes and let them set for forty-eight hours.

  2. Cut into pieces and roll each piece carefully 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. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

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
Forms the gel structure that sets the candy firm yet tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, and helps the candy stay soft and chewy.
Citric acid
Adds a tart edge that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil for twenty minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar and fully dissolves the gelatine. Boiling for too short a time can leave the candy soft and slow to set, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rose. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes