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Dessert

Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

A thickened orange and lemon sauce made with cornstarch, sugar, and orange juice, served hot or cold.

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

Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve cornstarch in a little cold water.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix orange juice, lemon juice, dissolved cornstarch, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat until it thickens into a syrup.

Finish and serve

  1. 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the juice and sugar into a syrupy sauce as it heats.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the sauce.
Orange juice
Provides the main orange flavor and liquid base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat until it thickens. Cornstarch only thickens fully once the mixture reaches a simmer and is stirred, so stopping too early leaves a thin sauce. Heating too hard can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pan.

“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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