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Lemon Sauce

A simple lemon sauce made by reducing sugar and water, then adding lemon juice and peel strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Lemon Sauce

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a pan.

  2. Simmer until the mixture is reduced by half.

Prepare the lemon

  1. Peel part of the lemon very thinly, then cut the peel into strips.

  2. Strain the lemon juice.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the strained lemon juice along with the strips of peel to the sauce.

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

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

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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as the syrup reduces, thickens the sauce body.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and the thin peel strips add aromatic lemon oils.

The step that matters

Reducing the syrup. As water evaporates, the sugar concentrates and the syrup thickens. Stopping at the stated reduction keeps the sauce pourable and sweet, while over-reducing makes it too thick and sticky.

“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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