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Drink

Orange or Lemon Syrup

A simple syrup made from white sugar, orange or lemon juice, and fruit peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 or Lemon Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1½ pounds of white sugar with 1 pint of orange or lemon juice in a pot.

  2. Add some peel from the fruit.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Bottle

  1. Bottle and cork it tightly.

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. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and orange 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

White sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and thickens the syrup as it boils down.
Orange or lemon juice
Supplies the main fruit flavour and acidity to the syrup.
Fruit peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils that give the syrup extra fragrance.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully and concentrates the syrup, which helps it keep. Boiling too briefly leaves it thin and more prone to spoiling.

“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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