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Drink

Excellent Orange Wine

A wine made by fermenting juice from Seville oranges with sugar and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,706 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Excellent Orange Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare the rinds of the oranges as thin as possible.

  2. Put two-thirds of the rinds into 6 gallons of water and let them soak for 24 hours.

  3. Squeeze the oranges to yield 7 or 8 quarts of juice and strain it into a pan.

  4. Add the squeezed oranges to another 6 gallons of water. Wash them well.

  5. Transfer the mixture to a third 6 gallons of water and let it sit until the next day.

Make the wine

  1. For each gallon of wine, add 3¼ pounds of loaf sugar to the strained liquid.

  2. Stir daily until the sugar is completely dissolved.

  3. Let it ferment for 4 to 5 weeks.

  4. Add 2 bottles of brandy.

  5. Stop the cask.

Age and bottle

  1. Let it age for 12 months 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. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Seville oranges
Provide the juice and rind that give the wine its bitter, aromatic flavour.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, providing the alcohol and body of the wine.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and stabilises the finished wine.

The step that matters

Stirring daily until the sugar dissolves. Sugar must fully dissolve so the yeast can ferment it evenly; undissolved sugar can leave the wine sweet or unstable.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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