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Dessert

Sultana Sauce

A sweet sauce made from raisins, flour, sugar, and water, finished with lemon peel and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sultana Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the raisins

  1. Pick over and wash the sultana raisins.

  2. Cook the raisins in boiling water until plump and tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir until smooth.

  3. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

  4. Drain the cooked raisins and add them to the sauce.

  5. Stir in the grated lemon peel and sherry or brandy.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sultana raisins
Plump up when cooked and add chewy sweetness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the lemon.
Lemon peel
Adds bright citrus aroma and a little acidity to the sauce.
Sherry or brandy
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour that carries through the sweet sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for the full 10 minutes. Flour starch only thickens fully when it is heated close to boiling and its granules swell. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and tasting raw and floury.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, flour, sugar, 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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