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Sauce

Orange Sauce

A simple sauce made from orange juice, corn starch, and sugar, thickened by heating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and orange work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 586 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix corn starch and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and heat it in a saucepan.

  3. Once the juice is hot, add the corn starch and sugar mixture.

  4. Cook until the sauce is clear.

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. Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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

Corn starch
Thickens the juice into a glossy sauce as it heats and gelatinizes.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the orange juice.
Oranges
Provide the juice, which supplies the main flavour and liquid for the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the starch mixture to hot juice. Corn starch must be mixed with sugar first so it disperses evenly, then added to hot liquid. Stirring in starch without dispersing it can cause lumps, and the sauce only thickens properly once it is heated enough for the starch granules to swell.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, 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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