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Sauce

Orange Sauce

A sweet orange sauce made by simmering orange pulp, juice, sugar, and water, thickened with 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Wipe the oranges and rasp the rind with a few lumps of sugar to extract the yellow part.

  2. Remove the pips and white skin from the oranges.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and cold water; bring to a boil.

  2. Add the orange pulp and juice to the saucepan.

  3. Thicken the mixture with arrowroot, adding more sugar if needed, and boil briefly.

Finish

  1. For a superior sauce, use the juice of an extra orange instead of water, then strain and reheat with 1 tablespoon of maraschino or curaçao.

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. Arrowroot + sugartop 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

Oranges
Provide the main flavour, pulp, juice and aromatic yellow rind.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a smooth, glossy sauce when heated.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the sauce, balancing the citrus acidity.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be mixed with cold liquid before it goes into the hot sauce, otherwise it clumps. It thickens when it reaches a boil, so the sauce should be boiled briefly to set fully and become clear and glossy.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, 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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