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Orange Soup

A chilled orange soup made with orange juice, water, sugar, and arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Bring the orange juice and water to a boil.

  2. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water, then add it to the boiling mixture.

  3. Cook for one minute, then strain the mixture.

  4. Stir in the sugar and let it cool.

Serve

  1. To serve, place a tablespoon of crushed ice in a glass and pour in the orange soup.

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

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

Orange and sugar 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

Orange juice
Provides the main flavor and liquid base of the soup.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, lightly glossy soup when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the orange juice.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot slurry. Arrowroot must be mixed with cold water first so it does not clump, then added to the boiling liquid and cooked briefly so it thickens fully. Lumps form if it is poured in dry or added without stirring.

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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