Skip to main content
Sauce

Jelly Sauce

A sauce made from currant jelly, butter, corn starch, lemon juice, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,927 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, beat together the sugar and butter.

  2. Dissolve the corn-starch in a little cold water.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the jelly gradually, mixing well.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and bring to a gentle boil.

  3. Add the lemon juice and adjust sweetness to taste.

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. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 fruit flavour and most of the sweetness in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Corn-starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a gentle boil. Corn-starch only thickens once it is heated to boiling and its granules swell and gelatinize. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and cloudy-tasting with a raw starch flavour.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, corn, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes