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Sauce

Marmalade Sauce

A sweet and tangy sauce made with orange marmalade, potato flour, water, orange rind, juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Potato and orange work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 537 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Marmalade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the potato flour, orange marmalade, water, orange rind, orange juice, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for one minute.

  3. Strain the sauce and serve hot or cold.

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. Potato + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together537 recipes

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Orange + sugartop 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).

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

Potato flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Orange marmalade
Adds sweetness and bittersweet orange flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the citrus acidity.
Orange rind and juice
Provide bright citrus aroma and acidity.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce. Potato flour only thickens fully once it reaches a boil, so the sauce should be brought to a boil and cooked for the full minute, then checked for the desired thickness before straining.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, orange, 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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