Name: Sauce Madere a LA Marmalade
Ingredients: ½ pound apricot marmalade; ⅓ cup Madeira or sherry

Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Sauce Madere a LA Marmalade

Ingredients

½ pound apricot marmalade
⅓ cup Madeira or sherry

Directions

Combine apricot marmalade and Madeira or sherry in a saucepan.
Boil for three minutes.
Pass the mixture through a sieve.
Serve as a sauce for soufflés or cabinet puddings.

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.

Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together173 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricot marmalade: Provides sweetness and fruit flavor, and its pectin helps the sauce thicken as it cools.
Madeira or sherry: Adds fortified-wine aroma and depth of flavor, with some of its alcohol cooking off during boiling.

“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.