Name: Orange Water Ick
Ingredients: 1 pint orange juice; 1 pint sugar; 1 quart water; rinds from 3 oranges

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 Water Ick

Ingredients

1 pint orange juice
1 pint sugar
1 quart water
rinds from 3 oranges

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil the sugar and water together.
Remove the yellow rinds from the oranges.
Add the rinds to the syrup.
Boil for 5 minutes, then let it cool.

Finish and freeze

Add the orange juice to the syrup.
Strain through a wire sieve.
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.

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

Sugar: Dissolves into the water to make a syrup that sweetens the drink and adds body.
Orange juice: Provides the main orange flavour and acidity.
Orange rinds: Release aromatic oils into the hot syrup, adding fragrance and bitterness.

“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.