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Drink

Iced Orange Juice

A chilled beverage made from orange juice, lemon juice, sugar syrup, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Iced Orange Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together for 10 minutes to make a syrup, then let it cool.

Mix and serve

  1. Mix orange juice and lemon juice in a bowl.

  2. Sweeten the juice mixture with the cold syrup to taste, keeping in mind the ice will dilute it.

  3. Fill tumblers with finely‑cracked ice and pour the orange mixture over 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. 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
Sweetens the juice and, dissolved into syrup, blends smoothly into the cold liquid.
Orange juice
Provides the main flavour and most of the liquid base of the drink.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that sharpens the sweetness and brightens the orange flavour.

The step that matters

Sweetening the juice. Ice melts and dilutes the drink as it is served, so the juice should be sweetened slightly more than final taste requires. Adding syrup gradually and tasting lets you judge the balance before dilution, which cold temperatures also make harder to perceive.

“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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