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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A sweet and tart sauce made with brown sugar, butter, cream, boiling water, and lemon or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix brown sugar with butter to form a paste.

  2. Add cream or milk and stir well.

  3. Pour in boiling water and boil for fifteen minutes.

Finish

  1. Season with lemon or vinegar to taste.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Provides the main sweetness and a caramel-like depth as it dissolves into the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the sauce.
Cream or milk
Adds creaminess and softens the sauce's texture.
Boiling water
Dissolves the sugar and thins the mixture into a pourable sauce as it reduces.

The step that matters

Boil for the full fifteen minutes. Boiling dissolves the sugar completely and reduces the liquid, which sets the sauce's consistency. Stopping early can leave it thin and grainy, while overcooking makes it thick and sticky.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream. 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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