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Dessert

Orange Honey

A sweet orange and lemon filling made with sugar, butter, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Honey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Peel the oranges and lemon.

  2. In a pot, combine the orange juice, grated rinds, sugar, and butter.

  3. Add the egg yolks and mix well.

  4. Simmer the mixture until it thickens, stirring occasionally.

Use

  1. Use as a filling for mirletons, fanchonettes, cheese‑cakes, dariole molds, talmouses, turnovers, tarts, or jelly cakes.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they set during simmering and add richness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture and silky mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the filling a thick, spreadable body.
Orange juice
Provides liquid and bright citrus acidity and flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with gentle heat. If the mixture boils or simmers too hard, the yolks can curdle and turn grainy, so keep the heat low and stir often.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, butter, 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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