Name: A Very Simple and Easy Method of Making a Very Superior Orange Wine
Ingredients: 90 Seville oranges; 32 lbs lump sugar; 14 gallons cold spring water

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 ↓

A Very Simple and Easy Method of Making a Very Superior Orange Wine

Ingredients

90 Seville oranges
32 lbs lump sugar
14 gallons cold spring water

Directions

Prepare

Break the sugar into small pieces and place it in a dry, sweet 9-gallon cask in a cool storage area.
Peel the oranges thinly and place the peels in a large pan.
Squeeze the juice from the oranges and place the pulp in another pan.
Strain the juice through double muslin and add it to the cask with the sugar.

Steep and strain

Pour 14 gallons of cold spring water over the peels and pulp.
Let it stand for 24 hours, then strain it into the cask.
Repeat the process of adding more water to the peels and pulp daily for a week, stirring the cask contents each day.

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.

Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Seville oranges: Juice adds acidity, and the peel oils add aroma and bitterness to the wine.
Lump sugar: Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast that turns the liquid into alcohol.

“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.