Skip to main content
Dessert

Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

A hot or cold orange sauce made with orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. In a saucepan, mix the orange juice, lemon juice, dissolved corn starch, and sugar.

  3. Cook over medium heat until it thickens into a syrup.

  4. Strain the sauce and serve it hot or cold.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Corn starch
Thickens the juice mixture into a syrup as it heats.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its syrupy body.
Orange juice
Provides the main orange flavor and liquid base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the orange flavor and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Dissolve the corn starch fully in cold water first. Corn starch clumps if added directly to hot liquid. Dissolving it in cold water first lets the starch granules disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when heated.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, corn, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes