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Orange Straws

Candied orange peel strips made by boiling peel, sugar, and water, then drying.

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 ↓

Orange Straws

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the peel

  1. Boil the orange peel in water for about two hours, changing the water once or twice.

  2. Drain the peel and cut it into narrow strips about two inches long.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 pound of sugar with 1 pint of water.

  2. Add the cut peel to the syrup and boil for 25 minutes.

Dry and store

  1. Remove the strips and lay them out on plates.

  2. Dry in a slow oven (300°F / 150°C) or another warm place for up to 24 hours if needed for storage.

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

Orange peel
Provides the main flavour and the bitter aromatic oils that give the straws their character.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as it cooks into the syrup, coats and preserves the strips.

“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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