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Orange Paste

A sweet paste made from boiled oranges and small apples, sweetened with sugar equal to the fruit's weight.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Boil the oranges, adding boiling water as needed until tender.

  2. Remove the pips from the oranges.

  3. Chop the oranges into a fine paste.

  4. Boil the pippins in the same manner until tender.

  5. Mix the boiled pippins with the orange paste.

Make the paste

  1. Boil sugar in water until it forms a syrup equal to the weight of the fruit.

  2. Add the fruit mixture to the syrup.

  3. Stir the mixture until it thickens.

Dry the drops

  1. Drop the mixture by teaspoonfuls onto a plate.

  2. Turn the drops daily to dry.

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 + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 main flavour, aroma and bulk of the paste.
Pippins (small apples)
Add natural pectin that helps the paste thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps it thicken and keep its shape as it dries.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it thickens. Sugar and fruit pectin must be cooked long enough to concentrate into a thick mass. Stopping early leaves the drops too soft to hold their shape while drying.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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