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Bigarade Sauce

A sauce made with orange peel, Espagnole sauce, stock, orange juice, lemon juice, port wine, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Bigarade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Cut the peel of half a Seville bitter orange into strips.

  2. Place the strips in a saucepan and cover with water. Boil for 10 minutes, then drain using a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine ½ pint of Espagnole sauce, ½ pint of rich stock or roast-meat gravy, and the juice of half the orange. Allow the mixture to reduce to half its quantity, then strain.

  2. Add the orange peel, 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, and ⅓ cup of port wine. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then bring to a boil again.

Serve

  1. Serve with roast wild duck or other game.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Orange + port winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together161 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Bitter orange + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Espagnole sauce
Forms the thick, savoury body of the sauce.
Rich stock or roast-meat gravy
Adds meaty depth and moisture, thinning the sauce as it reduces.
Seville bitter orange peel
Contributes aromatic oils and a bitter citrus flavour.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity richness to balance the bitterness.
Orange juice
Adds citrus acidity and fresh fruit flavour.

The step that matters

Reducing the sauce to half. Reduction concentrates flavour and thickens the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin and bland, while over-reducing makes it salty and syrupy once the port and seasoning are added.

Swap the bitter orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, meat, orange, lemon, port wine, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, meat, orange, lemon, port wine, pepper. 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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