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Drink

Florida Orange Wine

A beverage made from orange juice, sugar, egg white, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Florida Orange Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the oranges with a wet cloth and peel off the yellow rind very thin.

  2. Squeeze the oranges and strain the juice through a fine sieve.

Make the syrup

  1. Measure the juice and for each gallon, combine 3 pounds of sugar, the crushed egg white and shell, and ⅓ gallon of cold water in a pot.

  2. Heat the mixture, stirring every 2 minutes until the egg begins to harden.

  3. Boil the syrup until it looks clear under the froth of egg on the surface.

  4. Strain the syrup and pour it over the orange rind, letting it stand overnight.

Finish

  1. The next day, add the orange juice and let it stand again.

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).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Orange + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Oranges
Provide the juice and the yellow rind that flavour the finished wine.
Granulated sugar
Provides sweetness and the sugar that yeast or fermentation can later convert to alcohol.
Egg white and shell
As the egg white heats and sets, it gathers impurities and rises to the surface, clarifying the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it looks clear. Stirring while heating keeps the egg from sticking and clumping unevenly. Boiling until the froth clears shows the egg has coagulated and captured impurities, so the syrup is properly clarified before it is strained.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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