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Dessert

Crystallized Oranges

Orange quarters coated in boiled sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 oranges

  1. Peel the oranges, removing as much of the white skin as possible without breaking them.

  2. Divide the oranges into quarters.

  3. Pass a needle and cotton through the thick white center of each quarter and tie it in a loop.

  4. Hang the quarters by the loops on wire hooks shaped like an 'S', and suspend the hooks from a string stretched between two walls.

Crystallize

  1. Boil sugar on a quick fire until it bubbles and slightly changes color, but do not let it go beyond this point.

  2. Take each hook by the top and dip the orange in the boiling sugar.

  3. Remove it immediately and hang it up on the string.

  4. Dip each quarter separately until all are done.

  5. Let them hang until dry.

Serve

  1. Serve at dessert.

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

Sugar
Forms a hard, glassy coating that crystallizes as it cools and dries on the fruit.
Oranges
Provide the fruit that is coated and becomes the sweet, tangy confection.

The step that matters

Stopping the sugar at the right colour. Sugar cooked only until it bubbles and just begins to colour forms a thin, brittle coating when cooled. Cooking it further darkens it and adds bitterness, and it can burn, so the syrup must be removed from heat at this point.

“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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