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Dessert

Crystallized Oranges

A sweet treat made by coating orange quarters in sugar syrup until the syrup crystallizes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Crystallized Oranges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Peel and quarter the oranges.

  2. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water to make a syrup.

  3. Boil the syrup until it resembles candy around the edge of the dish.

Candy and dry

  1. Dip the orange quarters in the syrup and let them drain.

  2. Place the drained oranges in a warm area to allow the syrup to crystallize.

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 + 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

Oranges
The fruit being candied; its flesh and peel take up the syrup and become the sweet, glossy treat.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, dissolved and boiled into syrup, forms the crystalline coating as it cools and dries.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to the right stage. Sugar syrup must be cooked far enough that the water evaporates and the concentration rises. If it is undercooked, the coating stays sticky. If it is overcooked, the sugar darkens, tastes bitter and can harden too much.

“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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