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Sauce

Wine Cream Sauce

A sweet sauce made from wine, sugar, egg yolks, cinnamon, lemon, and orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, egg yolks, and white wine.

  2. Add the stick of cinnamon, lemon, and orange peel.

  3. Heat the mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat, strain, and serve immediately.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat, giving it a creamy body.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps balance the acidity of the wine.
White wine
Forms the liquid base and adds acidity and fruity flavour.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heating until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if the mixture gets too hot or is not stirred constantly, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy. Stirring keeps heat even.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, white wine, lemon, orange):

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, white wine, lemon, orange. 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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