Skip to main content
Dessert

Turkish Delight

A gelatinous sweet made with sugar, water, acid, and flavorings, set into squares and dusted with icing sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and raspberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Turkish Delight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup of cold water for 1 hour.

  2. In a pan, combine the soaked gelatine, sugar, and 1 pint of boiling water.

  3. Boil for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring well.

  4. Add citric or tartaric acid to taste.

Flavor and set

  1. Divide the mixture in half.

  2. Flavor one half with essence of lemon.

  3. Color the other half with cochineal and flavor it with raspberry or strawberry essence.

  4. Pour into flat dishes dipped in cold water and let set for 12 hours.

Finish

  1. Cut into squares and coat with 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 + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + raspberrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly with a tender bite.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and helps give the set jelly its soft texture.
Citric or tartaric acid
Adds sharpness that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Cochineal
Gives the second half a red colour.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring well. Stirring keeps the sugar and gelatine dissolved and prevents scorching on the base of the pan. Boiling concentrates the sugar so the mixture will set firm when cooled.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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 recipesRaspberry JamRaspberry Jam150 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes