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Dessert

Orange Biscuits, or Little Cakes

A biscuit made from boiled Seville orange peel and sugar, dried into shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar 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 Biscuits, or Little Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Boil the whole Seville oranges in two or three waters until most of the bitterness is gone.

  2. Cut the oranges and remove the pulp and juice.

  3. Grind the orange peel in a mortar until fine.

Make and dry the biscuits

  1. Mix the ground peel with an equal weight of sifted double-refined sugar to form a paste.

  2. Spread the paste thinly on China dishes.

  3. Set the dishes in the sun or near a fire to dry.

  4. When half dry, cut the paste into desired shapes and turn them over to dry the other side.

Store

  1. Store the biscuits in a box with layers of paper.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar 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

Whole seville oranges
Supply the peel, which becomes the flavourful, aromatic body of the biscuits.
Double-refined sugar
Binds with the ground peel into a paste and adds sweetness that helps the biscuits set as they dry.

The step that matters

Boiling the oranges in several changes of water. Boiling removes most of the bitter compounds in the peel. Too little boiling leaves the biscuits bitter, while over-boiling can soften the peel and weaken its flavour.

“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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