Name: Orange Wine
Ingredients: 100 Seville oranges; 30 lbs loaf sugar; water; ½ oz isinglass

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 Wine

Ingredients

100 Seville oranges
30 lbs loaf sugar
water
½ oz isinglass

Directions

Prepare the juice and peel

Peel the oranges very thin and press out the juice.
Put the juice and sugar into a cask.
Place the peel in a deep pan and cover with 1 gallon of cold water; let it stand overnight.

Ferment

Pour the water over the sugar and juice in the cask.
Cover the peel with more water and add it to the cask the next day; repeat until the cask is full.
Stir the mixture daily for 2 to 3 weeks until fermentation begins.
After nearly 2 months, draw off the wine, remove the lees, and clean the cask with a dry cloth.
Dissolve ½ oz of isinglass in a little wine, stir it in, and seal the cask until autumn.

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.

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

Seville oranges: Provide the juice and peel that supply the wine's flavour and the sugar's fermentable base.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Isinglass: Fining agent that helps clear the wine by drawing out suspended particles.

“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.