Skip to main content
Main

Arrowroot Broth

A thin broth made with water, lemon juice, sugar, nutmeg, sea salt, and arrowroot.

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

Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot 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 Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a saucepan, combine the water, lemon juice, sugar, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Stir in the dissolved arrowroot.

  4. Boil for five minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Serve warm.

  2. Ensure the broth is very thin.

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 + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Nutmeg + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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
Starch that thickens the liquid when heated, giving a light, glossy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note.

The step that matters

Stir in the dissolved arrowroot. Arrowroot is a starch that thickens when heated. If it is not fully dissolved before it goes in, it can clump into lumps instead of thickening the liquid evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, arrowroot. 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