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Dessert

Orange Sauce

A sweet orange sauce made with butter, sugar, flour, orange rind, orange juice, and boiling water, served hot with puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl.

  2. Add the flour, grated orange rind, and orange juice, mixing well.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and bring the mixture to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with boiled puddings.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Flour + orangetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,821 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Creamed with sugar to add richness and a smooth, rounded body to the sauce.
Sugar
Creamed with butter and dissolves into the sauce, adding sweetness that balances the orange acidity.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Orange juice
Provides the main citrus flavour and acidity.
Orange rind
Adds aromatic orange oils for fragrance and a stronger citrus flavour.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Flour thickens only when it is heated enough for its starch granules to swell and set, so the sauce must reach a full boil to reach its intended thickness.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour. 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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