Name: Orange Sauce
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon butter; 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 teaspoon corn starch; Salt to taste; Boiling water or orange juice; Grated rind of 1 orange

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

Melt the butter in a saucepan.
Cook the corn starch in the melted butter.
Add boiling water or orange juice, salt, sugar, and the grated rind of the orange.
Stir until well combined and heated through.

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.

Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together586 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,345 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + corntop 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 sauce as it heats with the liquid, giving it body.
Butter: Adds richness and carries the flavour of the cooked starch.
Orange rind: Supplies aromatic orange oils that flavour the sauce.