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Dessert

Orange-flower Candy

A candied confection made with sugar, water, egg white, and orange blossom petals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Prepare the syrup

  1. Beat ¾ pint of water with ¼ of a white egg.

  2. Pour the mixture over 2 pounds of sugar broken into lumps.

  3. Let it stand for a while.

  4. Place the mixture over a clear fire and boil for a few minutes.

  5. Set aside until the scum subsides, then clear it off.

  6. Boil the sugar until very thick.

Make the candy

  1. Gradually stir in 3 ounces of orange-blossom petals.

  2. Continue stirring until the candy forms a white mass in the pan.

Shape and store

  1. Quickly spoon the candy onto thick, dry sheets of writing paper laid flat on dishes or trays.

  2. Remove the candy before it is completely cold and lay it reversed on dishes or place the cakes on their edges until fully cooled.

  3. Store in airtight tin boxes or canisters to keep them fresh for over a year.

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).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + orangetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Sugar
Forms the sweet, crystalline body of the candy as it boils and thickens.
Orange-blossom petals
Add floral aroma and flavour to the thickened sugar mass.
Egg white
Helps the syrup clarify by binding impurities that rise as scum for removal.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar until very thick. Sugar must reach a high enough concentration to set firm once cooled. Stop too early and the candy stays soft; go too far and it turns hard or brittle. Stirring in the petals only after the syrup is thick keeps the aroma and texture even.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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