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Sauce

Jelly Sauce

A sauce made by melting currant or grape jelly with butter and sherry or red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sherry work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the jelly in a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter slowly and let it boil for one minute.

  3. Remove from heat and just before serving, stir in the sherry or red 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. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Currant + buttertop 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 or grape jelly
Supplies the sweetness, fruity flavour and body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy finish by blending into the warm sauce.
Sherry or red wine
Adds aroma and a sharp acidity that cuts the sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the butter. Butter must be added slowly to the hot, melted jelly and kept moving so it blends in as a smooth emulsion. Adding it all at once can leave greasy droplets floating on the surface instead of a uniform, glossy sauce.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sherry. 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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