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Dessert

Orange Biscuits, or Little Cakes

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

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 oranges in two or three waters until most bitterness is gone.

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

  3. Beat the orange peel finely in a mortar.

Make and dry the biscuits

  1. Mix the beaten peel with an equal weight of sifted sugar to form a paste.

  2. Spread the paste thinly on China dishes and set in the sun or before the fire.

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

Store

  1. 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

Seville oranges
Peel supplies the bitter, aromatic flavour and the body that holds the biscuit together.
Double-refined sugar
Sweetens the biscuits and, once mixed with the peel, binds it into a firm paste that dries.

The step that matters

Boiling the peel in several changes of water. Bitter compounds are concentrated in the peel and dissolve into hot water, so repeated boiling removes most of the bitterness. Stopping early leaves the biscuits unpleasantly bitter.

“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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