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Orange Sauce

A sweet and tart sauce made from orange rind, currant jelly, sugar, orange and lemon juice, optionally flavored with port or sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the grated rind of 2 oranges, 6 tablespoons of currant jelly, and 1 tablespoon of white sugar.

  2. Beat the mixture for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the juice of the 2 oranges and 1 lemon, then mix well.

  4. Strain the sauce and stir in 2 tablespoons of port or sherry if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve with roast fowl.

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. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Orange + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides sweetness and body, and helps thicken the sauce as it is beaten.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruity flavour that balances the sweetness of the jelly.
Orange rind
Contributes aromatic oils that give the sauce a strong citrus fragrance.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts the sweetness.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Currantthe original

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