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Sauce

Raisin Sauce

A sauce made by boiling raisins with water, then thickening with flour and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the raisins

  1. Boil the raisins with water for two hours, replenishing the water as it boils away.

Thicken the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with the sugar.

  2. Add the mixture to the raisin broth.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Sultana raisins
Release sugars and fruity flavour into the liquid as they soften, giving the sauce its body and sweetness.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and rounds out the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and sugar mixture to the broth. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid unless its grains are separated and dispersed. Mixing it with sugar first helps spread the particles, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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