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Cocoanut Sauce

A coconut-flavored sauce made by boiling milk, adding sugar and thickening with cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cocoanut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Flavor 1 pint of fresh milk with coconut.

  2. Remove the coconut and add enough fresh milk to make 1 pint.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk to boiling.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Thicken with 2 even tablespoons of cornstarch.

Finish

  1. Proceed as directed for Mock Cream.

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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the coconut flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the milk.
Cornstarch
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells and sets when heated.

The step that matters

Thicken with cornstarch. Cornstarch only thickens once the liquid is hot enough for its starch granules to swell and gel. If it is added unevenly, it clumps, so stir it in thoroughly while the milk is boiling.

“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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