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Sauce

Richelieu Sauce

A sweet sauce made with sugar, boiling water, arrowroot, sherry, shredded almonds, and candied cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Richelieu Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and boiling water.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Mix arrowroot with a little water, then add to the saucepan.

  4. Cook until clear.

Finish

  1. Remove from heat and stir in sherry, shredded almonds, and candied cherries.

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. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sherry + almondtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together517 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the sauce as it dissolves and thickens slightly with the syrup.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce to a clear, glossy consistency when heated.
Shredded almonds
Adds nutty texture and flavour to the finished sauce.
Candied cherries
Adds sweetness, colour and chewy bits of fruit to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until clear. Arrowroot must be heated until the sauce turns clear and thickens. Undercooked arrowroot leaves the sauce cloudy and thin, and it loses thickening power if boiled too long or stirred excessively.

“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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