Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce

A thick sauce made by reducing cider with apples and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cider and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Reduce the cider

  1. Boil down 3 pails of cider into 1 pail.

  2. Add the quartered apples and lemon peel to the cider as it boils down.

  3. Continue adding apples until the cider can no longer boil down.

  4. Stir the apples well to prevent burning, which will take about 3 to 4 hours.

Finish and store

  1. Once smooth, transfer the sauce to a clean wooden or stone vessel and cover it.

  2. Store in a dry place.

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. Cider + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  3. Cider + lemontop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together986 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cider
Reducing it concentrates its sugars and flavor, forming the body of the sauce.
Apples
Their pectin and softened flesh thicken the reduced cider into a smooth sauce.
Lemon peel
Its aromatic oils add a bright citrus fragrance that balances the sweetness of the cider.

The step that matters

Stir the apples well. As the cider reduces, its sugars concentrate and scorch easily on the bottom of the pan. Frequent stirring keeps the apples moving and prevents burning, which would taint the sauce's flavor.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, apple):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, apple. 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.

You might also like

Cider SauceCider Sauce15 recipesHot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes