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Dessert

Orange Flower Pralines

A confection of orange flowers cooked with sugar and dried to form pralines.

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 Flower Pralines

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flowers

  1. Wash the orange flowers.

  2. Dry the orange flowers.

Make the praline

  1. Combine the orange flowers with sugar boiled to the low degree.

  2. Reduce the sugar to the high degree, ensuring the flowers are covered.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Stir until the sugar grains.

  5. Place the flowers in a warm area to dry.

  6. Rub them frequently with hands.

  7. Mix with 1 lb sifted crushed loaf sugar to enlarge and whiten them.

  8. Store the finished pralines in bottles.

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

Orange flowers
Provide the main flavour and aroma of the praline.
Sugar
Forms the crystalline coating around the flowers, giving the praline its sweetness and structure.

The step that matters

Reduce the sugar to the high degree. Sugar must be cooked far enough to form a coating that dries and grains once stirred. If it is undercooked the flowers stay sticky; if overcooked it turns hard and brittle instead of crystallising around them.

“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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