Name: Orange Sauce
Ingredients: Juice of 1 China orange; ½ of the orange peel; ½ cup cullis; 1 anchovy; Cayenne pepper to taste

Why it works: Orange and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Squeeze the juice of the China orange into a saucepan.
Boil half of the orange peel until tender.
Rub the boiled peel through a fine sieve and add it to the orange juice.
Add the cullis and the anchovy, also rubbed through a sieve.
Season with a little Cayenne pepper and bring to a boil.

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.

Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,402 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).
Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,232 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Orange + anchovytop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together93 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cullis: Provides the body and thickness that give the sauce its structure.
Anchovy: Adds savoury depth, rounding out the sweetness and acidity of the orange.
Orange peel: Contributes bitter aromatic oils and body when boiled and pureed.