Skip to main content
Main

Red Currant Sauce

A sauce made with red currant jelly, butter, flour, onion, water, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Hamilton, Margaret · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and onion work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and 257 recipes mention both. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Also mentioned in the method: butter, flour

Directions

Prepare the onion

  1. Slice the onion.

  2. Boil the sliced onion in one pint of water until soft.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the red currant jelly to the pot.

  2. Blend the butter and flour together until smooth.

  3. Strain the mixture into the jelly and water.

  4. Boil up and season with salt and pepper.

By Hamilton, Margaret. 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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Red currant + oniontop 14% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together257 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant
Adds tart, fruity flavour and body to the sauce.
Butter (in the method)
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the sauce as it heats and the starch swells.
Onion
Softens into a mild, savoury base that flavours the liquid.

The step that matters

Boil up after adding the butter and flour. The flour must come to a full boil to thicken the sauce and lose its raw, floury taste. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and pasty.

“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

Illustration of Tomato SoupIllustrationTomato Soup526 recipesIllustration of Brown BreadIllustrationBrown Bread461 recipesIllustration of Mutton BrothIllustrationMutton Broth292 recipesIllustration of Yorkshire PuddingIllustrationYorkshire Pudding264 recipes