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Drink

Orange Bouillon

A chilled orange juice beverage thickened with arrowroot and sweetened, finished with curacao cordial.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Bouillon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the orange base

  1. Combine orange juice and sugar in a double boiler.

  2. Cover and stir until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is scalded.

Thicken

  1. Dissolve arrowroot in cold water.

  2. Add the dissolved arrowroot to the mixture in the boiler.

  3. Stir until the mixture thickens and becomes clear.

  4. Cook the mixture for five minutes.

Chill and serve

  1. Set the mixture aside to cool on ice.

  2. Once cold, stir in the curacao cordial.

  3. Serve in glasses with cracked ice.

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. Sugar + arrowroottop 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a smooth, clear, glossy bouillon when heated.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the orange juice.
Orange juice
Provides the main liquid and orange flavor of the bouillon.
Curacao cordial
Adds orange aroma and sweetness, stirred in once the base is cold.

The step that matters

Stir in the arrowroot and cook until clear. Arrowroot thickens only when heated and then holds its gel; if it is undercooked the bouillon stays thin and cloudy, while overcooking can thin it again. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed so no lumps form.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot. 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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