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Dessert

Pistachio Sauce

A sweet sauce made with sugar, arrowroot, boiling water, vanilla, almond or pistachio flavoring, and pistachios or maraschino cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistachio Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine sugar and arrowroot with boiling water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Remove from heat and add vanilla, almond extract, and pistachios or maraschino cherries.

  4. Color the sauce pale green with food coloring if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Arrowroot + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Arrowroot + vanillatop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Vanilla + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 boils, giving it a smooth, glossy body.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it body as it dissolves into the hot water.
Pistachio nuts
Add the main nutty flavor and small pieces of texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boil while stirring constantly. Arrowroot must be kept moving as the mixture heats so it disperses evenly and thickens smoothly. Letting it settle can cause lumps and uneven thickening.

“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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