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Dessert

Marmalade, Orange, Sauce

A sweet orange marmalade sauce made with sherry, water, sugar, and thickened with arrowroot.

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

Marmalade, Orange, Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine orange marmalade, sherry, water, and white sugar in a saucepan. Boil until the sugar is dissolved.

  2. Thicken the mixture with arrowroot as needed.

  3. Serve warm over pudding.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Sherry + arrowroottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

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

  5. 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 marmalade
Adds citrus flavor and sweetness to the sauce.
Sherry
Adds a fortified wine aroma and depth of flavor.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the liquid to form the sauce base.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with arrowroot as needed. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can become thin or cloudy if overcooked or stirred too long after thickening. Add it gradually and stop once the sauce coats a spoon.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sherry, 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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