Name: Orange Syrup
Ingredients: 1½ pounds fine sugar; 1 pint orange juice

Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 Syrup

Ingredients

1½ pounds fine sugar
1 pint orange juice

Directions

Make the syrup

Squeeze the oranges and strain the juice from the pulp into a large pot.
Boil the juice with the sugar until dissolved.
Strain the mixture well and let it cool.

Bottle

Immediately bottle, cork, and seal the syrup.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Fine sugar: Dissolves into the juice to add sweetness and body to the syrup.
Orange juice: Forms the liquid base and provides the citrus flavor of the syrup.

“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.