Name: Sweet Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup white or red currant jelly; ⅓ to ⅔ cup red or white wine

Why it works: Red currant and white wine work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup white or red currant jelly
⅓ to ⅔ cup red or white wine

Directions

Melt the currant jelly in a saucepan over low heat.
Add the red or white wine and stir until combined.
Serve the sauce in glasses or glass dishes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Red currant + white winetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together47 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 main sweetness, fruity flavour and thickening body of the sauce.
Wine: Thins the melted jelly into a pourable sauce and adds acidity and aroma.

“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.