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Dessert

Cinnamon Sauce

A sweet sauce made from cinnamon, sugar, and water, thickened with arrowroot or corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 166 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cinnamon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cinnamon infusion

  1. Break the cinnamon stick into small pieces.

  2. Combine cinnamon, sugar, and water in a pan.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Skim and strain the liquid into a basin.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix arrowroot or corn starch with cold water.

  2. Add the thickening mixture to the pan.

  3. Remove the cinnamon pieces.

  4. Boil again until thickened.

  5. The sauce is ready.

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. Cinnamon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 or corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce as it heats and gelatinises.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the sauce.
Cinnamon
Gives the sauce its main aroma and flavour as it steeps in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Add the thickening mixture to the pan. Starch must be fully mixed into cold water first, then added to a hot liquid while stirring. Otherwise it clumps and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Beetrootfits less well
  4. Mustardfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, sugar. 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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