Skip to main content
Dessert

Sauce a LA Flavour

A simple sweet sauce made with water, sugar, butter, thickening, and lemon or vanilla.

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

Why it works: Butter and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and 41,197 recipes mention both. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

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

Directions

  1. Boil the water in a saucepan.

  2. Add sugar to taste and 2 tablespoons of butter.

  3. Once boiling, add the thickening.

  4. Stir in lemon or vanilla for flavoring.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Butter + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,197 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together53,530 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together98,096 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and lemon share little aroma chemistry, yet 53,530 recipes mention both: they likely 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, the main taste this sweet sauce is built on.
Thickening
Thickens the boiling liquid so it becomes a sauce rather than thin water.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Peachbetter flavor fit
  3. Applebetter flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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 Lemon CakeIllustrationLemon Cake228 recipesIllustration of Lemon IceIllustrationLemon Ice147 recipesIllustration of Lemon SherbetIllustrationLemon Sherbet103 recipesIllustration of Lemon CustardIllustrationLemon Custard64 recipes