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Sauce

Currant Sauce

A savory sauce made with soup stock, currant jelly, lemon, spices, butter, and thickened with cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine soup stock, currant jelly, lemon juice and rind, salt, cloves, and black pepper in a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter and bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Dissolve cornstarch in a little water and add it to the saucepan. Stir until the sauce thickens, then serve.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Currant + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides the sweetness and fruity flavour that defines the sauce.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Soup stock
Forms the savoury liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the cornstarch slurry. Cornstarch must be dissolved in cold water before it goes into the hot liquid, because dry starch added directly clumps. The sauce should then be stirred while it thickens so the starch gelatinises evenly and the texture stays smooth.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, clove, pepper, butter, egg):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, clove, pepper, butter, egg. 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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