Name: Orangeade
Ingredients: 3 oranges; 3 lumps of sugar; ½ bottle of soda water (or 1 pint of cold 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

Ingredients

3 oranges
3 lumps of sugar
½ bottle of soda water (or 1 pint of cold water)

Directions

Prepare the oranges

Wipe the oranges with a clean, damp cloth.
Rub the sugar on the rinds of the oranges.

Make the orangeade

Put the sugar in a jug and squeeze the juice of the oranges over it.
Stir and crush the sugar with a wooden spoon to dissolve it.
Add the soda water or cold water and mix well.

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 the aromatic oil in the rind that flavours the drink.
Sugar: Sweetens the drink and, rubbed on the rinds, picks up citrus oil for extra aroma.
Soda water: Adds fizz and lightens the drink; cold water can be used instead.

“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.