Skip to main content
Sauce

Orange Sauce

A sauce made from orange juice, peel, stock, anchovy, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Squeeze the juice of the orange into a saucepan.

  2. Boil half of the orange peel until tender.

  3. Rub the boiled peel through a fine sieve and add it to the orange juice.

  4. Add the cullis and the anchovy, also rubbed through a sieve.

  5. Season with a little Cayenne pepper and bring to a boil.

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Orange + anchovytop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Orange juice
Provides the sharp, fresh citrus acidity and flavour that defines the sauce.
Orange peel
Adds aromatic oils and a slightly bitter citrus edge once boiled and sieved into the sauce.
Cullis
Supplies the liquid body and savoury base that the sauce is built on.
Anchovy
Adds deep savoury, umami flavour that rounds out the sauce without tasting fishy.

The step that matters

Rubbing the peel and anchovy through a fine sieve. Pushing the solids through a fine sieve breaks them into a smooth purée that thickens the sauce and removes fibrous bits, giving an even texture rather than a gritty one.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (anchovy, pepper):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against anchovy, pepper. 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.

More orange sauce recipes

Cold 11for Ice Cream 6for Game 4 See all 73 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes