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Hot Raspberry and Strawberry Sauce

A hot sauce made from sugar, raspberry and strawberry juice, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 815 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Hot Raspberry and Strawberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, fruit juice, and lemon juice.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens into a syrup.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce hot or cold.

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. Raspberry + strawberrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Raspberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Strawberry + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + strawberrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 thickens it into a syrup as it reduces.
Fruit juice
Provides the raspberry and strawberry flavour and most of the liquid that reduces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling until it thickens into a syrup. As the liquid boils, water evaporates and the sugar concentrates, so the sauce thickens. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while boiling too long can make it overly thick and sticky as it cools.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, raspberry, strawberry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raspberry, strawberry. 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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