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Dessert

Lemon or Orange Sauce

A sauce made by simmering shredded lemon or orange rind with sugar and water until clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the fruit very thinly and shred it finely.

  2. Put the shredded fruit into a clean saucepan.

  3. Strain the juice.

Simmer the sauce

  1. Add the juice to the saucepan with the water and sugar.

  2. Simmer very slowly for one hour, or until the rind is clear and curling.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemon or orange
The juice provides sourness, while the thin peel adds aroma and a slightly bitter edge.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavour that balances the citrus acidity.

The step that matters

Simmer very slowly. Gentle, slow heat softens the rind and draws its flavour into the liquid gradually. Fast boiling can make the rind tough and bitter and can scorch the sugar.

“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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