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Guava Sauce

A sweet sauce made from guava juice, butter, flour, and sugar, served hot with cottage pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Guava Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Stew the guava.

  2. Pour off the juice.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan until it bubbles.

  2. Add the flour and mix thoroughly.

  3. Stir in the guava juice with the sugar until well combined.

  4. Bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with cottage pudding.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + guavatop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Sugar + guavatop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the guava.
Guava juice
Supplies the liquid and the fruity flavor that the flour thickens.

The step that matters

Add the flour and mix thoroughly. The flour must be fully blended into the melted butter before liquid goes in. Dry flour left clumped will form lumps that do not dissolve, and the starch thickens unevenly.

Swap the guava

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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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