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Dessert

Fruit Sweet Sauces

A sauce made from plums or cherries stewed with wine, cinnamon, bread, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and red wine work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 107 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Fruit Sweet Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the plums or cherries in cold water and remove the stones.

  2. Break the stones.

  3. Blanch the kernels.

  4. Boil them gently in a little water.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the fruit with the red wine and ground cinnamon until tender.

  2. Add the toasted bread and the water from the kernels.

  3. Stew until everything can be pulped through a sieve.

  4. Mix in sugar to taste.

  5. Thin the sauce with additional wine or water if desired.

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. Plum + red winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Plum + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Red wine + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol (whiskey, malt).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Plums or cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour, and their pulp gives the sauce its body.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour while the fruit stews.
Toasted bread
Helps thicken the sauce as it stews and pulps.

The step that matters

Stew until everything can be pulped through a sieve. The fruit, bread and liquid must be soft enough to pass through a sieve. If the mixture is under-cooked, the pulp stays fibrous and the sauce turns out grainy and thin.

“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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