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Dessert

Orange Sticks

Candied orange peel sticks made by boiling strips, cooking in sugar syrup, and rolling in granulated sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Orange Sticks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Cut the peel of the oranges into strips.

  2. Place the strips in cold water and boil for about 10 minutes.

  3. Pour off the water and repeat this process three times.

  4. Let the strips drain free of water.

Candy and finish

  1. Prepare a syrup by combining 2 cups of sugar and ½ cup of water.

  2. Add the drained peel to the syrup and cook until all the syrup is absorbed.

  3. Roll the orange sticks in granulated sugar.

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

Oranges
Supply the peel, which becomes the candy's chewy, bitter-aromatic base.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as syrup, penetrates it to preserve and candy it.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into syrup and carries it into the peel during cooking.

The step that matters

Cook until all the syrup is absorbed. Sugar syrup must be cooked down into the peel gradually. Stopping too early leaves sticky, wet candy, while overcooking can crystallize or scorch the sugar, so watch the pan closely.

“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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