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Sauce

Wine Sauce

A sauce made by boiling sherry wine with sugar, thickening with corn flour, and seasoning with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Wine Sauce

Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 1 cup of sherry wine with sugar to taste.

  2. Gradually pour the hot wine over 2 tablespoons of corn flour.

  3. Stir over heat until the mixture thickens.

  4. Add a pinch of nutmeg.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sherry + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,246 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

Corn flour
Thickens the sherry into a smooth sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Sherry wine
Provides the main liquid and its distinctive flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot wine over the corn flour. Adding the wine gradually and stirring keeps the starch dispersed, so it does not clump. Stirring over heat then lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, wine, sugar, corn, flour. 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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