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Dessert

Turkish Delight

A gelatinous sugar candy flavored with orange and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Turkish Delight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in ¼ cup of water in a pan and boil for 2-3 minutes.

  2. In another pan, combine the sugar with the remaining ¼ cup of water and bring to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

Cook the mixture

  1. Stir in the dissolved gelatine continuously.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

  3. Add finely chopped orange and lemon peel, along with the orange juice.

  4. Let it sit by the heat for 10-15 minutes.

Set

  1. Strain the mixture into a flat tin rinsed with water.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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 once it cools.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and the bulk of the candy's body and texture.
Orange
Adds citrus aroma from the peel and acidity from the juice.
Lemon
Adds fragrant citrus aroma from its peel.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture for 20 minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, which is what lets the candy set firm. Boiling too briefly leaves it soft and sticky, so the full time matters.

“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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