Name: Orange Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint Brown Sauce (thick); juice of 3 sweet oranges (or sugar to sweeten if sour); ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; peel of 1 orange (peeled thinly and shredded)

Why it works: Sauce and orange work together. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 723 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Orange Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint Brown Sauce (thick)
juice of 3 sweet oranges (or sugar to sweeten if sour)
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
peel of 1 orange (peeled thinly and shredded)

Directions

In a saucepan, combine the Brown Sauce and the juice of the oranges.
Add the coarse sea salt and the shredded orange peel.
Simmer the mixture for 5 minutes.

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.

Sauce + orangetop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together723 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sauce: Forms the thick body of the sauce, giving it structure and a rich base.
Oranges (juice): Provides acidity and sweetness that brighten the thick brown sauce.
Orange peel: Adds aromatic oils that give the sauce a fresh citrus fragrance.

“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.