Name: Orangeade or Orange Drink
Ingredients: 1 orange; 3 oranges; 1 ounce sugar or honey; 1 quart boiling water

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 ↓

Orangeade or Orange Drink

Ingredients

1 orange
3 oranges
1 ounce sugar or honey
1 quart boiling water

Directions

Prepare

Peel the rind of 1 orange very thinly, avoiding the white pith, and place it in a jug.
Remove the white pith from 3 oranges and cut them into slices, discarding the seeds.

Steep

Add 1 ounce of sugar or honey to the jug.
Pour 1 quart of boiling water into the jug, cover it, and let it steep until completely cool.

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

Oranges: Provide the juice and aromatic oil that give the drink its flavor and acidity.
Sugar or honey: Adds sweetness to balance the sharp acidity of the orange.

“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.