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Dessert

Cold Lemon Sauce

A chilled sauce made from flour, water, sugar, lemon juice, and grated rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cold Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Stir enough white flour, wet with cold water, into the boiling water to achieve the consistency of thin cream.

  2. Sweeten to taste.

  3. Add the juice and grated rind of the lemon.

Chill and serve

  1. Let the mixture stand until cold before serving with cold blanc-mange or puddings.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Sugar and lemon 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

White flour
Thickens the boiling water into a thin, pourable sauce as the starch swells.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the sauce.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic lemon oils for fragrance and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the boiling water. Flour added without being wetted first clumps into lumps that will not smooth out. Wetting it with cold water into a slurry lets the starch disperse evenly before it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cream, 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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