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Orange Ob Lemon Wine Without Boiling

A fermented wine made from orange and lemon rinds, sugar, honey, and brandy, aged for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and honey are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,068 recipes. Both carry pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Orange Ob Lemon Wine Without Boiling

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Shave the rinds of a dozen oranges, adjusting for desired bitterness.

  2. Pour boiling water over the rinds and let it stand for 12 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture into a cask and add the sugar.

Make the juice

  1. Remove all peel and white pith from the oranges, then squeeze the juice through a fine sieve into the cask.

  2. Wash the sieve and pulp with cold water, letting the pulp soak for 24 hours.

  3. Strain the soaked pulp and add the liquid to the cask, stirring continuously.

  4. Repeat soaking and straining until the cask is full, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Ferment and age

  1. Leave the mixture to ferment for several weeks until the hissing noise subsides.

  2. Add honey and brandy, then cover the cask with brown paper.

  3. Let the wine age in the cask for one year 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 + honeytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,068 recipes

    Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

  3. Honey + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (sweet).

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

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

  5. 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 the bitter peel that flavour the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and sweetness in the finished wine.
Honey
Adds extra sweetness and body to the finished wine.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content, adding strength and preserving the wine.

The step that matters

Removing the white pith. White pith is bitter and can spoil the wine's flavour, so the peel and pith must be removed fully from the oranges before the juice is squeezed.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, honey, 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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