Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Sauce

A sweet sauce made from sugar, water, flour, butter, fruit juice, and optional ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix sugar and flour together in a saucepan.

  2. Add boiling water and cook until thick.

  3. Stir in butter and fruit juice.

  4. Add vinegar if desired.

  5. Omit ginger if you prefer.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they 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

Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and adds body as the mixture thickens.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Fruit juice
Supplies the fruit flavour and much of the liquid in the sauce.

The step that matters

Add boiling water and cook until thick.. Flour thickens only when its starch granules swell and gelatinize in hot liquid. Stirring while it cooks keeps the sauce smooth and cooks out the raw flour taste. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and floury.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter. 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.

More fruit sauce recipes

Syrup 6Hot 6Four 5 See all 47 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipes