Name: Fruit Sauce
Ingredients: ⅔ cup sugar; 1 pint raspberries or strawberries; 1 tablespoon melted butter; 1 cup hot water

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Sauce

Ingredients

⅔ cup sugar
1 pint raspberries or strawberries
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 cup hot water

Directions

Combine sugar, raspberries or strawberries, melted butter, and hot water in a saucepan.
Boil slowly, removing any scum that rises to the surface.
Strain the mixture through a sieve.
Serve with dumplings or apple 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.

Sugar + buttertop 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

Raspberries or strawberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and colour for the sauce.
Sugar: Sweetens the sauce and balances the fruit's tartness.
Melted butter: Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the sauce.

“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.