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Sauce

Orange Sauce for Sweet Puddings

A citrus sauce made from orange rind, pulp, juice, sugar, arrowroot, and maraschino or curaçao, thickened over low heat.

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 ↓

Orange Sauce for Sweet Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavored sugar

  1. Grate the yellow rind from the large sweet orange using the sugar lumps.

  2. Scrape out the pulp and juice from the two sweet oranges and add to the flavored sugar.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the arrowroot smoothly with the maraschino or curaçao.

  2. Stir the mixture gently over low heat for 3 to 4 minutes until the sauce thickens.

  3. Serve immediately.

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

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

Sugar and orange 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, glossy body.
Maraschino or curaçao
Adds liqueur flavor and aroma to the sauce.
Sweet oranges
Provide juice for liquid and pulp and rind for citrus flavor and aroma.
Sugar lumps
Sweeten the sauce and absorb orange oil from the rind.

The step that matters

Stir gently over low heat. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can turn thin or cloudy if overheated or stirred too hard, so gentle heat and steady stirring keep the sauce smooth.

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.

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