Ingredients · Fruit

Orange

Citrus x sinensis · Rutaceae (citrus family)

Orange
Dried orange — pieces, and sometimes the blossom — as distinct from the dried peel sold as a spice. In a tea blend orange does something peel alone cannot: the fruit brings sweetness and body where the peel brings only the bright bitter oil. Eleven products here carry it, mostly fruit infusions and Ayurvedic blends, where it is doing the work of making a cup of herbs taste like a drink.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromChina (native range)
TasteSweet, round citrus with a little bitterness behind it; brighter and less sharp than lemon

How to use it

In fruit infusions and spiced blends, where it sweetens and rounds. In mulling mixes with clove and cinnamon. Rehydrated into compotes and syrups. Cold-brewed for iced tea. Orange blossom is a different thing entirely — floral and perfumed rather than fruity — and a little goes far.

With food

Chocolate. Clove and cinnamon. Cranberry. Almond. Duck and pork. Fennel. Olive. Dark caramel. Rhubarb.

With spices

Cloves, cinnamon and star anise for mulling. Cardamom. Ginger. Coriander seed, which shares its citrus note. Bergamot.

With tea

Black tea of almost any kind. Rooibos. Pu-erh, in the aged-peel tradition. Hibiscus and rosehip for a tart fruit cup.

Its story

Where it comes from

The sweet orange comes from a region spanning southern China, northeast India and Myanmar; the earliest mention is in Chinese literature in 314 BC. The Moors brought the bitter orange into Iberia, with large-scale growing from the tenth century; the sweet orange arrived in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century with Italian and Portuguese merchants and was well known across Europe by 1646. Our shop notes list Brazil, which is a production fact rather than a lot record.

What happened

Several languages simply named the sweet orange after Portugal — Italian portogallo, Greek portokali, Ottoman Turkish portakal — after the merchants who brought it. The word orange itself came the other way, from Dravidian through Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. Louis XIV loved orange trees enough to build the grandest orangery of all at Versailles. Columbus may have planted oranges on Hispaniola in 1493; the Spanish brought them to Florida in 1565 and missionaries to Arizona between 1707 and 1710. The orange in a Christmas stocking traces, in the popular telling, to Saint Nicholas, who is said to have thrown three bags of gold through a poor man's window so his daughters need not be sold, one of them landing in a stocking hung to dry; three gold balls, sometimes drawn as oranges, became his symbol. Marmalade's origin stories are mostly untrue: neither Mary, Queen of Scots nor a broken-down orange ship at Dundee gave it its name or its start.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

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