Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit with Orange Sauce

A fruit dish served with a thickened orange sauce containing candied cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and arrowroot work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fruit with Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a chafing dish, combine the orange juice and sugar.

  2. Moisten the arrowroot in a little cold water.

  3. When the juice is hot, add the arrowroot and cook until thick.

Add the fruit and serve

  1. Stir in the candied cherries and orange pieces.

  2. Cook for three minutes and serve.

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 + arrowroottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar 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

Orange juice
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies the orange flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances its acidity.
Arrowroot
Thickens the hot juice into a glossy sauce as its starch swells.
Oranges
Add fresh citrus flavor and juicy texture to the fruit.

The step that matters

Add the moistened arrowroot to hot juice. Arrowroot starch must be fully hot to swell and thicken. Adding it to cold or lukewarm juice, or skipping the wet pre-mix, causes lumps, and the sauce stays thin if it is not cooked until thick.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes