Skip to main content
Drink

To Make Orange Wine a Third Way

A fermented beverage made from water, sugar, egg whites, yeast, lemon syrup, and orange juice and peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

To Make Orange Wine a Third Way

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Boil water, sugar, and egg whites for 45 minutes, skimming well.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Mix in yeast, syrup of lemons, and the juice and peel of the oranges.

  4. Let it work for 2 days and 1 night.

  5. Turn it.

Bottle

  1. After 3 months, bottle it.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Powdered sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that give the wine its character.
Egg whites
Bind fine particles during boiling so they can be skimmed off, clarifying the liquid.
Oranges
Supply juice and peel for flavour, aroma, and natural acidity.

The step that matters

Skimming while boiling. Egg whites coagulate and carry impurities to the surface as foam. Removing that foam clarifies the liquid, so skipping or rushing the skimming leaves cloudiness and off-flavours in the finished wine.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, syrup, lemon. 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.

More orange wine recipes

Seville 16Florida 15Trifle 3 See all 78 →

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes