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Oranges — Continued

A sauce made from orange pieces, broth, sugar, cayenne pepper, red currant jelly, mustard, shallot, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 859 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Oranges — Continued

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the orange

  1. Cut the large orange in half.

  2. Remove the peel and pith from one half.

  3. Slice the peeled half into quarters.

  4. Remove all the seeds.

  5. In a saucepan, combine the orange pieces with 1 teacup of water.

  6. Boil for 3 minutes.

  7. Drain the orange pieces.

Make the orange sauce

  1. In another saucepan, bring 1/2 cup of broth to a boil.

  2. Add the orange pieces.

  3. Add a little sugar.

  4. Add the juice from the remaining half of the orange.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  6. Skim frequently.

  7. Transfer the sauce to a sauceboat.

  8. Serve the sauce.

Make the currant jelly sauce

  1. Mix 8 tablespoons of red currant jelly with 1 tablespoon of made mustard.

  2. Add a little pepper.

  3. Add the minced shallot.

  4. Rub the rinds of 2 sweet oranges with sugar.

  5. Mix the rinds into the jelly.

  6. Add enough port wine to achieve a consistency that sticks to the spoon.

  7. Slice the rinds of 2 more oranges finely.

  8. Mix the sliced rinds into the sauce.

  9. Pour the sauce into bottles for storage.

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. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Orange + red curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Red currant + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together49 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant jelly
Provides sweetness and body, setting the sauce's thick, spoonable consistency.
Port wine
Thins the jelly mixture to a spoonable consistency and adds depth of flavour.
Broth
Provides the liquid base for simmering the orange pieces into the sauce.
Sweet oranges
Supply aromatic peel and bright citrus flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently and skim. Gentle simmering keeps the orange pieces tender and the broth clear, while skimming removes foam and impurities that would otherwise cloud the sauce and taste bitter.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, pepper, red currant, mustard, shallot, port wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pepper, red currant, mustard, shallot, port wine. 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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