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Dessert

Orange Biscuits

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

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

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

  3. Beat the orange peel very finely in a mortar.

Make the paste

  1. Add an equal weight of fine sifted sugar to the orange peel.

  2. Mix well to form a paste.

Dry and shape

  1. Spread the paste thinly on china dishes.

  2. Set the dishes in the sun or in front of the fire to dry.

  3. When half dry, cut into cakes and turn them over to dry completely.

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
Peel provides the bitter, aromatic flavour that defines the biscuit once boiled and dried.
Fine sifted sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and, as it dries with the peel, helps bind the paste into a firm cake.

The step that matters

Boiling the oranges in two or three waters. Boiling in several changes of water draws out the bitter compounds in the peel. If too little bitterness is removed, the dried biscuits will taste harsh rather than sweet and fragrant.

“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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