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Dessert

Orange-flower Candy

A sweet candy made by boiling sugar and water with orange blossoms, then straining and storing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water together until the mixture reaches a syrupy consistency.

  2. Add the orange blossoms after the syrup has boiled for about 10 minutes.

  3. Simmer the blossoms in the syrup for 5 more minutes.

Infuse and strain

  1. Pour the mixture out and let it infuse until the next day.

  2. Bring the syrup back to a boil, strain it through muslin to remove the blossoms, and store it.

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

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Orange + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Sugar and orange 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that carries the blossom flavour and sets the candy.
Orange blossoms
Provide the orange-blossom aroma that infuses into the syrup.

The step that matters

Bringing the syrup back to a boil before straining. Reheating the syrup after infusion helps it stay stable for storage and lets the flavour be drawn off cleanly before the blossoms are removed. Straining through muslin keeps fine plant material out of the finished syrup.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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.

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