Name: Strawberries and Oranges
Ingredients: 1 quart ripe strawberries; ½ cup powdered sugar; ⅓ cup orange juice

Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 ↓

Strawberries and Oranges

Ingredients

1 quart ripe strawberries
½ cup powdered sugar
⅓ cup orange juice

Directions

Cover the strawberries with powdered sugar.
Pour the orange juice over the strawberries.
Serve immediately.

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.

Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Strawberries: Provide the main fruit body, flavor and juicy texture of the dessert.
Powdered sugar: Sweetens the berries and draws out their juices as it dissolves.
Orange juice: Adds acidity and citrus aroma that brighten the sweetness of the berries.

“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.