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Dessert

Orange Ice

A chilled orange and lemon ice made by freezing a sugar syrup with citrus juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Orange Ice

Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Orange Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 4 cups of sugar with 1 quart of water until it forms a thick syrup.

Add the juice and freeze

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the juice of 12 oranges and 4 lemons.

  2. Add 1 quart of cold water and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a freezer and freeze until solid.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

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

  3. 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the ice and keeps it from freezing rock-hard.
Orange juice
Supplies the main citrus flavor and liquid that forms the ice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and sharpens the orange flavor.

The step that matters

Freezing until solid. Sugar lowers the freezing point of the mixture, so it stays slushy longer than plain water. Freezing until fully solid takes patience, and stirring part-way through can help break up large ice crystals for a smoother texture.

“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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