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Sauce

Jam Sauce

A simple jam-based sauce thickened with cornflour, sweetened with sugar, and brightened with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Jam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, combine water, jam, lemon juice, and sugar.

  2. Boil for five minutes.

  3. Mix cornflour with a little cold water and pour it into the saucepan.

  4. Stir until it boils again.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the mixture to remove the jam and serve.

  2. Add a few drops of cochineal for color if desired.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Cornflour
Thickens the sauce as it boils, giving it a smooth, glossy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sauce.
Jam
Provides the main fruit flavor and sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring cornflour into the boiling sauce. Cornflour must be mixed smoothly with cold water first, then stirred in and brought back to a boil. Adding it dry or lumpy leaves clumps, and the starch only thickens fully once the mixture boils again.

“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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