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Drink

Orange Wine

A fermented beverage made from water, sugar, yeast, lemon and orange juice, wine, raisins, and orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil 8 gallons of spring water for 45 minutes with 12 pounds of powdered sugar and beaten egg whites.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add 6 tablespoons of yeast.

  3. Juice 12 lemons and mix with 2 pounds of white sugar in a tankard; let it stand overnight.

  4. Add the lemon mixture to the cooled water.

  5. Add the juice and rinds of 50 oranges, avoiding the white parts, and let it ferment for 48 hours.

  6. Stir in 2 quarts of Rhenish or white wine and transfer to a vessel.

Make the raisin version

  1. For a raisin version, chop 30 pounds of raisins and prepare 10 Seville oranges as for preserving.

  2. Boil 8 gallons of soft water until reduced by a third, then cool slightly.

  3. Pour 5 gallons of hot water over the raisins and orange peel, stir, cover, and let it cool for 5 days, stirring once or twice daily.

  4. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing out as much liquid as possible.

  5. Transfer to a barrel and add the rinds of the remaining 10 oranges, cut thin.

Finish and bottle

  1. Make a syrup with the juice of 20 oranges and 1 pound of white sugar the day before bottling.

  2. Mix well and seal the barrel; let it stand for 2 months to clear before bottling.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Orange + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Orange + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together730 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Bind impurities as they boil, helping clarify the liquid.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Powdered sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Malaga raisins
Add sugar, body and fruit flavour to the raisin version.
Seville oranges
Contribute bitter aromatic oils and acidity from the peel and juice.

The step that matters

Let the raisin mixture cool before adding it. Pouring in too much hot water or adding yeast-sensitive ingredients while very hot can stress or kill yeast, stalling fermentation. Cooling and stirring the mixture for several days lets flavours extract gently without cooking the fruit.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, lemon, orange, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, lemon, orange, white wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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