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Dessert

Rahat Lakum

A sweet, gelatinous confection made from sugar syrup, starch, egg whites, lemon juice, and optional rose essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 264 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rahat Lakum

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with 3 pounds of icing sugar and 3 pints of water.

  2. Clear the syrup with the whites of 3 eggs and the juice of 1 lemon.

Make the paste

  1. Dissolve 6 ounces of pure wheat starch in ¾ pint of cold water, strain it, and add to the boiling syrup.

  2. Reduce the mixture by boiling until it thickens and becomes stringy.

  3. Flavor the paste with attar of roses or any sweet essence if desired.

Set and cut

  1. Grease a large dish with almond oil and pour the cooled paste into it, spreading it about 1 inch thick.

  2. Once cool, carefully turn the paste onto a dish covered with finely powdered sugar.

  3. Absorb excess oil with blotting paper and cut the paste into 2-inch squares.

  4. Dust the pieces with sugar and store them in a dry 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. Wheat + almondtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lemon + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Icing sugar
Provides the sweet base and, once boiled, the body of the syrup.
Pure wheat starch
Thickens the boiled syrup and gives the set candy its firm, sliceable structure.
Whites of eggs
Help clarify the syrup, so the finished candy is clear rather than cloudy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps keep the sugar syrup from crystallising.

The step that matters

Reducing the mixture until stringy. Boiling must go far enough to thicken the starch and concentrate the sugar. If it is undercooked the paste stays soft and will not set firm; the stringy texture signals the right point to pour it out.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, wheat, almond, 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.

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