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Sauce

The Sauce

A buttery currant jelly sauce with onion, flour, and water, seasoned with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and currant work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 366 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

The Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Fry the onion in the butter until brown, then remove it.

  3. Stir in the flour and add the water.

  4. Let the mixture boil.

  5. Stir in the currant jelly and season with pepper and salt.

  6. If needed, add a few drops of carmine for color.

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. Raspberry + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together366 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + raspberrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the onion's flavor and adds richness to the sauce.
Raspberry or red flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the butter and water.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness, tartness and fruit flavor, and its pectin helps the sauce set.
Onion
Browning in butter builds a savory, aromatic base for the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and water. Flour must be mixed smoothly into the fat and liquid, because dry starch clumps when it hits hot liquid unless it is stirred well. Cooking it until it boils lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, raspberry, onion, pepper):

  1. Mangofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, raspberry, onion, pepper. 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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