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Orange Sauce

A sauce made with brown sauce, orange juice, peel, salt, water, stock, and sugar, simmered and reduced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the base

  1. Add the juice of the oranges, salt, and shredded orange peel to the Brown Sauce.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes in water.

Finish the sauce

  1. Strain the mixture and stew it in a little stock and sugar for another 30 minutes.

  2. Strain again and reduce the stock to a half-glaze.

  3. Combine the reduced stock with the sauce and add the shredded orange peel.

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. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Sauce + orangetop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together723 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Brown sauce
Provides the thick body and savoury base that the sauce is built on.
Orange juice
Adds fruity acidity and bright flavour that cut through the rich brown sauce.
Orange peel
Adds aroma and a slight bitter edge from its essential oils.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the orange juice and rounds out the flavour.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock to a half-glaze. As liquid evaporates, sugar and salt concentrate quickly, so the glaze can turn too thick, sticky, or scorched if it is left unattended or reduced too far.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, 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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