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Orange Sauce

A thick orange sauce made with brown sauce, glaze, pepper, lemon and orange juice, thickened with arrowroot and sherry, served with game birds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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

Make the sauce

  1. Combine thick brown sauce, glaze, pepper, lemon juice, castor sugar, and orange juice in a saucepan and boil together.

  2. Thicken the mixture with arrowroot mixed with sherry, stirring until it reboils.

  3. Strain the sauce through a fine cloth.

Prepare and add the garnish

  1. Add sliced oranges to the sauce.

  2. Heat the sauce with oranges in a double boiler.

  3. Soak orange peel in cold water with a pinch of salt.

  4. Bring the soaked peel to a boil.

  5. Strain the peel and rinse in hot water.

  6. Add the rinsed peel to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with wild duck, teal, turkey, or braised ham.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

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

  5. Orange + arrowroottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a glossy, smooth body.
Thick brown sauce
Forms the savoury base that the citrus flavours are built on.
Orange juice
Adds bright fruit flavour and sweetness to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the oranges and sugar.
Sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a mellow wine flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be mixed smooth with the sherry first and stirred in while the sauce is hot until it reboils. Added lumpy or left to stand, it clumps, and the sauce will not thicken evenly or clear properly.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, pepper, lemon, sugar, orange, sherry):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, pepper, lemon, sugar, orange, sherry. 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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