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Sauce

Jelly Sauce

A sauce made with butter, currant jelly, sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice, and wine, simmered and served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the currant jelly and sugar until smooth.

  3. Add the cornstarch mixed with lemon juice to prevent separation.

  4. Cook for 2 minutes.

Hold and serve

  1. Keep warm in a bowl over boiling water.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the wine.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly
Provides the sweet-tart fruit flavour and sets the body of the sauce as it melts.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce by swelling in the liquid as it heats.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma, thinning the sauce and lifting the fruit flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the starch mixture stable.

The step that matters

Add the cornstarch mixed with lemon juice. Cornstarch clumps if it hits hot liquid dry, so it must be blended with a little liquid first. Cooking it briefly after adding lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, lemon, wine):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, lemon, wine. 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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