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Lemon Sauce for Brown Betty

A lemon-flavored sauce made with butter, sugar, lemon juice, rind, corn starch, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,927 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce for Brown Betty

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the lemon juice, grated rind, and hot water.

  3. Mix the corn starch with 2 tablespoons of cold water.

  4. Stir the corn starch mixture into the hot mixture and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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 + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, creamed with butter, helps give it a light texture.
Lemons
Provide acidity and aroma from the juice and grated rind.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce when heated to a boil.

The step that matters

Stir the corn starch mixture into the hot mixture and bring to a boil. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water before it goes into hot liquid, or it clumps. It thickens only once it reaches a boil, so the sauce needs to be brought fully to a boil to reach its final thickness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, corn. 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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