Skip to main content
Sauce

Kirsch Sauce

A sweet sauce made with sugar, water, cornstarch, and Kirsch wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,581 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Kirsch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine sugar and 1 cup of cold water in a saucepan.

  2. Heat until boiling.

  3. Mix cornstarch with ⅓ cup of cold water until smooth.

  4. Once the water is boiling, add the cornstarch mixture and stir for 2 minutes.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the Kirsch wine.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce and serve with pudding.

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 + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body and a smooth, pourable texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps balance the tartness of the Kirsch.
Kirsch wine
Adds a distinctive cherry aroma and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the cornstarch mixture to boiling water. Cornstarch thickens only when it reaches a boil with the liquid. Adding it to water that is not yet boiling, or stirring too little, can leave the sauce thin or lumpy.

“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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes