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Sauce

Dried Currant Sauce

A sauce made from dried currants, butter, flour, and hot water, served with boiled fish or beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dried Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak the currants in boiling water for 30 minutes.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

  4. Gradually add the hot water, stirring constantly until smooth.

  5. Mix the soaked currants into the sauce.

  6. Serve with boiled white fish or boiled beef.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Dried currants
Provide the fruity sweetness and chewy texture that flavour the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the melted butter and water.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot water, stirring constantly until smooth. Flour clumps when liquid is poured in too fast, because starch granules hydrate unevenly. Adding the water slowly while stirring disperses the flour evenly, giving a smooth, lump-free sauce.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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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