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Orange Sauce

A savory orange sauce with ham, cayenne, port wine, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the shallots and place them in a small saucepan with the orange rind, ensuring no white pith remains.

  2. Add the chopped raw ham and cayenne pepper, then moisten with port wine and meat gravy.

  3. Simmer gently for about 10 minutes.

  4. Add the juice of the orange and lemon juice, then strain through a fine sieve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce as it reduces.
Meat gravy
Provides savoury body and richness, moistening the ham and shallots.
Raw ham
Contributes salty, savoury meat flavour to the sauce.
Orange
Supplies fragrant citrus aroma and bright acidity from the rind and juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. Gentle simmering lets the flavours blend and the liquid reduce without boiling hard, which can turn the sauce bitter or cloudy and make it harder to strain cleanly.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, lemon, ham, pepper, port wine, meat):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Red currantfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, lemon, ham, pepper, port wine, meat. 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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