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Orange Biscuits or Little Cakes

A sweet biscuit made from boiled Seville orange peel and sugar.

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 or Little Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

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

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

  3. Finely grind the orange peel in a mortar.

Make and dry the biscuits

  1. Mix the ground peel with an equal weight of double-refined sugar until it forms a paste.

  2. Spread the paste thinly on China dishes and place them in the sun or near a fire.

  3. When half-dry, cut into desired shapes, turn them over, and dry the other side.

  4. Store in a box with layers of paper.

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
Provide the peel, which supplies the bitter citrus flavour and aroma that define the biscuits.
Double-refined sugar
Sweetens the peel and binds it into a paste that can be spread and dried into a firm biscuit.

The step that matters

Boiling the oranges in several changes of water. Boiling draws out bitterness from the peel; stopping too early leaves the biscuits harshly bitter, while over-boiling softens the peel and weakens its structure before grinding.

“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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