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Orange Sauce

A sauce made from orange juice, sugar, cornstarch, and egg yolk, simmered and thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the orange

  1. Score the orange with a silver fork, avoiding the bitter white part.

  2. Place the orange in a saucepan.

  3. Roll the orange around.

  4. Let it stand for 10-15 minutes.

  5. Rinse off the hot water to extract the oil.

  6. Halve the orange.

  7. Strain the juice into a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the juice.

  2. Stir in the cornstarch mixed with a little cold water.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolk.

  4. Beat briskly.

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. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + orangetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the juice as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and body as it cooks.
Orange
Supplies the juice and aromatic oil that flavour the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the beaten egg yolk. Egg yolk can scramble if it meets very hot liquid directly. Beating briskly while adding it helps distribute the yolk evenly and keeps it smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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