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Drink

Orangeade

A citrus drink made by simmering orange peel and sugar with water, then straining and diluting with cold water and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar 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 ↓

Orangeade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the peel from 3 oranges as thinly as possible.

Make the syrup

  1. Add the peel and sugar to 1 pint of water, then simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Combine and serve

  1. Strain the orange juice into a glass jug, and add the remaining 3 pints of water.

  2. Once the syrup is cold, strain it into a jug, add a handful of crushed ice, and serve immediately.

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

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

Orange and sugar 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

Orange juice
Provides the main citrus flavour and acidity that defines the drink.
Orange rind
Adds aromatic oils from the peel, giving a stronger orange aroma to the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the drink and, dissolved in simmered water, carries the rind flavour into the syrup.

The step that matters

Simmering the peel and sugar syrup. Simmering gently dissolves the sugar and draws aromatic oils from the peel into the water. Boiling hard can make the syrup bitter from pith and oils, so the heat should stay low.

“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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