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Orange Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, orange juice, rind, stock, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rind

  1. Cut the rind of the oranges into very thin strips and shred them.

  2. Parboil the shredded rind in boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir constantly.

  3. Gradually pour in the white stock and orange juice while stirring.

  4. Add the seasonings and the shredded orange rind, then mix well.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and carries the flour to form a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Orange juice
Adds sweet-tart citrus flavor and acidity to the sauce.
Orange rind
Adds aromatic oil and a bitter citrus note to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds brightness and acidity that balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Gradually pour in the white stock and orange juice while stirring.. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring spreads the flour's starch evenly through the melted butter. Pouring it in all at once can leave lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, lemon, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon, pepper. 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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