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Sauce

Sweet and Sour Sauce, No. 1

A vinegar-based sauce with sugar, onion, lemon, bay leaf, flour, and egg yolks, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweet and Sour Sauce, No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, combine vinegar, white stock or water, sugar, onion, lemon, and bay leaf.

  2. Cook slowly for about 10 minutes.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Dissolve flour in a little water and add to the sauce.

  5. Boil for 5 more minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in beaten egg yolks.

  2. Heat to boiling point while stirring constantly.

  3. Serve hot or cold with fish.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Vinegar + oniontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the sweet and sour balance.
Sugar
Supplies sweetness to offset the acidity of the vinegar and lemon.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch gelatinizes when heated.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as their proteins set when gently heated.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the sauce is too hot when they go in. Removing the pan from heat before stirring in the beaten yolks, then heating only to boiling while stirring constantly, keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, lemon, pepper, flour, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, lemon, pepper, flour, egg. 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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