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Drink

Excellent Orange Wine

A fermented wine made from Seville orange rinds and juice, sweetened with loaf sugar and fortified with 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 oranges

  1. Thinly peel the rinds from the oranges and place two-thirds into 6 gallons of water. Let sit for 24 hours.

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

  3. Add the squeezed oranges to another 6 gallons of water and wash well by hand.

Make the wine

  1. Combine the strained juice with 6 more gallons of water.

  2. For each gallon of wine, add 3¼ pounds of loaf sugar to the cask with the strained liquor.

  3. Stir daily until the sugar is fully dissolved and let ferment for 4-5 weeks.

Age and bottle

  1. Add 2 bottles of brandy, seal the cask, and 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 peel that supply the wine's acidity and aroma.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the fermentation and provides sweetness, with the alcohol produced balancing it.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the wine during aging.

The step that matters

Stirring daily until the sugar dissolves. Sugar must be fully dissolved so yeast can ferment it evenly; undissolved sugar sinks and can leave the wine unevenly fermented or too sweet.

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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