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Dessert

Sugar of Roses in Various Figures

A candied sugar confection flavored with rose water, rose buds, and lemon juice, shaped into figures.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rose and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,174 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sugar of Roses in Various Figures

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the roses

  1. Clip off the white of rose-buds and dry them in the sun.

  2. Finely pound the dried rose-buds.

Make the sugar

  1. Wet the sugar with rose-water and boil it until it reaches a candy height.

  2. Add the powdered rose-buds and lemon juice, mixing well.

  3. Pour the mixture onto a pie plate and cut it into lozenges or shape it into figures like men, women, or birds.

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. Rose + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Loaf sugar
Forms the sweet candy base that sets firm when boiled and cooled.
Dried rose-buds
Supply the rose flavour and aroma once powdered into the sugar.
Lemon juice
Adds a touch of acidity that brightens the floral flavour and balances sweetness.
Rose-water
Moistens the sugar so it dissolves evenly before boiling, and adds floral aroma.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to candy height. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration and temperature to set firm as a candy. Too little boiling leaves it sticky, while overboiling can make it hard, brittle, or scorched.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rose. 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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