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Dessert

Fruit Sauce

A fruit sauce made from raspberries, strawberries, grapes, currants, and sugar, thickened with cornstarch or fruit jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and currant work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 346 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Fruit Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Simmer the fruit with a little water to extract the juice.

  2. Strain the juice through a thin cloth.

  3. Heat the juice until scalding.

Thicken and sweeten

  1. Mix 1 tablespoon of cornstarch with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Add the cornstarch mixture to the hot juice and cook for a few minutes until thickened.

  3. Sweeten to taste.

  4. If needed, dissolve 3-4 tablespoons of fruit jelly in 1 pint of hot water as a substitute for fruit juice.

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. Grape + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together346 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the juice into a smooth sauce as it cooks and gelatinizes.
Raspberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and color, and the juice that forms the sauce.
Strawberries
Add fruity flavor and color to the juice base.
Grapes
Add juice and fruity sweetness to the sauce base.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Adding the cornstarch mixture to the hot juice. Cornstarch must be mixed smooth in cold water first, or it clumps. It thickens only when the juice is hot and cooked for a few minutes, so it needs enough heat and stirring to turn clear and thick.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against grape, sugar. 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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