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Orange Ice

A frozen beverage made from orange rind steeped water, sugar syrup, orange juice, and optional lemon juice.

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

  1. Steep the rinds of six oranges in one quart of water.

  2. In another pot, boil two cups of sugar with half a cup of water for fifteen minutes to make a syrup.

  3. Skim the syrup and strain the water from the orange peel.

  4. Combine the syrup and the steeped water.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Add juice and freeze

  1. Add the juice of the oranges and the juice of a lemon for extra flavor.

  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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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 syrup to add sweetness and softness to the frozen texture.
Oranges
Supply the juice for flavor, and the steeped rinds add aroma to the base.
Lemon
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before freezing. Freezing a warm mixture takes longer, which lets larger ice crystals form and gives a coarser, icier texture. Cooling first helps the ice set smoothly.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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