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Dessert

Orange Salad

A chilled orange salad with lemon juice, sugar, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the orange base

  1. Cut the oranges in half and shred them finely with a silver fork, removing all seeds.

  2. Add the juice of the lemons and sugar to the shredded oranges.

Make the gelatin

  1. Dissolve the gelatin in 1 cup of cold water.

  2. Add 1 cup of hot water to the gelatin mixture and stir.

Combine and set

  1. Combine the orange mixture with the gelatin mixture, then stir the combined mixture well.

  2. Set the mixture on ice until it becomes stiff.

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. 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

Oranges
Provide the main body, aroma and sweet-tart flavour of the salad.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness of the oranges and sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the salad and balances the acidity of the citrus juice.
Rock gelatine
Sets the juices into a firm, sliceable mass as it cools.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatin fully. Gelatine must be completely dissolved before it is combined with the fruit; undissolved granules leave gritty, uneven patches and weak setting.

“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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