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Sauce

Jelly Sauce

A sauce made from currant jelly, butter, lemon, nutmeg, sugar, wine, and flour, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually beat the boiling water into the currant jelly.

  2. Add the melted butter, lemon juice, and grated peel, and nutmeg.

  3. Warm the mixture almost to a boil.

  4. Stir in the powdered sugar, then add the flour mixed with a little cold water.

  5. Boil sharply for a moment, then add the wine and remove from heat.

Hold and serve

  1. Cover and set in a vessel of hot water until needed.

  2. Stir well before serving.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Currant jelly
Provides the main body, sweetness and fruity flavour of the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with liquid.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sweetness of the jelly.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour must be fully mixed into cold water first, then added to the hot sauce and boiled briefly. Adding it dry or unmixed causes lumps, and without a short boil the starch does not fully swell, leaving the sauce thin and floury-tasting.

Swap the currant

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

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

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