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Sauce

Orange Sauce Pob Cottage Pudding

A sauce made from grated orange rind, orange juice, sugar, milk, butter, and flour, served over cottage pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Orange Sauce Pob Cottage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the orange

  1. Grate the yellow rind of the orange and squeeze the juice.

  2. Combine the orange rind, juice, and sugar in a bowl.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, bring the milk and butter to a boil.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour moistened with water or milk.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the orange mixture without boiling.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Its rind and juice add the bright citrus aroma and tartness to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the acidity of the orange juice.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which the flour thickens.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Stir in the orange mixture off the heat. Adding the acidic orange juice to hot, thickened milk off the heat avoids overheating and curdling, and keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, butter, flour. 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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