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Drink

Orangeade

A citrus drink made by steeping orange rinds, dissolving sugar in water, and mixing with orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Orangeade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Pare the rinds of the sweet and Seville oranges thinly.

  2. Steep the rinds in 1 quart of boiling water for 6 hours.

Make and strain the drink

  1. Make a syrup by dissolving 1 pound of loaf sugar in 3 pints of water.

  2. Add the syrup to the steeped rinds along with the juice of the sweet and Seville oranges.

  3. Stir the mixture and pass it through a jelly bag.

  4. If not sweet enough, add capillaire.

  5. If flat, add the juice of 2 lemons.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sweet oranges
Their juice supplies the main body, sweetness and fruit flavour of the drink.
Seville oranges
Their sharp juice and fragrant peel add acidity and a bitter aroma.
Loaf sugar
Dissolved into syrup, it sweetens the drink and balances the citrus acidity.

The step that matters

Steeping the rinds. The oils and aromatic compounds in the peel dissolve slowly into the water over hours, so steeping for the full time gives the drink its characteristic orange aroma. Cutting the rinds too thick limits how much oil and flavour they release.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. 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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