Skip to main content
Main

Arrowroot Sauce

A thickened sauce made with arrowroot, water, milk, lemon juice, sugar, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Arrowroot Sauce

Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the arrowroot with cold water.

  2. Add the remaining water, milk, lemon juice, sugar, and flavoring.

  3. Stir over heat until it boils.

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.

  1. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, glossy sauce as it heats.
Milk
Adds body and a creamy richness to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce's flavor.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until it boils. Arrowroot thickens when heated to a boil, but it can clump if added to hot liquid without first being mixed smooth in cold water. Keep stirring so it thickens evenly and does not scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesArrowroot GruelArrowroot Gruel37 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes