Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Sticks

Candied orange strips coated in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Orange Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the orange

  1. Slice oranges into narrow strips.

  2. Cover with water and scald 3 times.

Candy and coat

  1. Prepare a syrup by boiling together ½ cup water and 2 cups sugar.

  2. Place orange strips in syrup and boil.

  3. Remove and place on a towel to absorb syrup.

  4. Roll in granulated sugar to coat.

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 + 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

Oranges
Provide the main flavour and the peel that becomes the candied strips.
Sugar
Sweetens the strips and, once cooked, forms a syrup that preserves and glazes them.

The step that matters

Scalding the orange strips three times. Repeated boiling in fresh water draws out bitterness from the peel. Skipping or shortening these rounds leaves the strips bitter, since the white pith holds bitter compounds that only dissolve with repeated cooking.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes