Why it works: Butter and arrowroot work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
A Quick and Simple Dessert
Ingredients
Directions
Fry slices of sponge cake in butter until brown.
Spread slices of fruit on each piece.
Stir a little arrowroot into the heated fruit juice to make a thick sauce.
Cover the slices generously with the sauce.
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.
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Butter + arrowroottop 27% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together610 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sponge cake
- Forms the base of the dish, soaking up butter and sauce while frying.
- Butter
- Fat that browns the cake surface through frying, adding richness and flavour.
- Fruit juice
- Liquid base of the sauce, which the arrowroot thickens.
- Arrowroot
- Starch that thickens the heated fruit juice into a glossy sauce.
The step that matters
Stirring arrowroot into the fruit juice. Arrowroot must be mixed with a little cold liquid first and added to heated juice, then stirred while it heats. Added dry or unstirred, it clumps and thickens unevenly.
“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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