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By Harold McGee
Published 2004
Orange flowers come from the bitter or Seville orange, Citrus aurantium, and they have been used for millennia to flavor sweets and other dishes in the Middle East, usually in the extract called orange-flower water. The distinctive perfume results from a mixture of terpenes also found in roses and lavender, with an important contribution from the same compound that flavors concord grapes (methyl anthranilate).
From the book On Food and Cooking (2nd edition) by Harold McGee. © 2004 Harold McGee. By permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.