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Sauce

Creole Sauce

A sauce made with lemon juice, powdered sugar, mustard, and tomato ketchup, heated until near boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Creole Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the lemon juice, powdered sugar, mustard, and tomato ketchup in a saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture until it is near boiling.

  3. Serve hot with meats.

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. Sugar + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Mustard + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,482 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + ketchuptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together331 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the lemon and ketchup.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that gives the sauce its bite.
Tomato ketchup
Provides tomato flavour, sweetness and body to the sauce.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, mustard, ketchup. 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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