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Orange and Mint Sauce for Roast Lamb

A citrusy sauce made from oranges, lemon juice, sugar, mint, and water, served chilled with roast lamb.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 and Mint Sauce for Roast Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Quarter the oranges and cut them into small pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, boil ½ cup sugar with a little water until it threads slightly.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the juice of 1 lemon and the chopped mint to the sugar mixture.

  2. Prepare the sauce in the morning and set it on ice until ready to serve.

Serve

  1. Serve in sherbet glasses.

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 + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Orange + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

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

  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

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup to provide sweetness and body for the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the orange flavour and balances the sugar.
Oranges
Provide the main fruit flavour and juicy pieces for the sauce.
Mint
Adds a fresh, aromatic note to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar with water until it threads slightly. Sugar syrup that is cooked too little stays thin, while cooked too far it turns thick and can crystallise or caramelise. Stopping at the thread stage gives a syrup that carries the fruit well when chilled.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, 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.

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