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Drink

Orange Ice

A chilled beverage made from orange and lemon juice, boiled water, and sugar.

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

Prepare

  1. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and lemons.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the broken peel and pulp.

Steep and strain

  1. Let the mixture cool.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Combine the strained water with the orange and lemon juice.

Sweeten and freeze

  1. Sweeten with loaf sugar to taste.

  2. Freeze the mixture.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Orange juice
Provides the main flavour and natural sweetness and acidity of the ice.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the ice and lowers its freezing point, softening the texture.

The step that matters

Sweeten to taste before freezing. Sugar lowers the freezing point of water, so it keeps the ice softer. Tasting and adjusting sweetness before freezing matters, because frozen mixtures taste less sweet than they do liquid.

“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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