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Vinegar Sauce

A sweet and tangy sauce made with butter, brown sugar, vinegar, lemon essence, and thickened with flour or cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Vinegar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, beat together the butter, brown sugar, cornstarch (or flour), lemon essence, and vinegar until creamy.

  2. Pour the boiling water into the mixture and stir well.

  3. Let it boil for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet pudding.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a caramel-like depth of flavour.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and a smooth texture to the sauce.
Flour or cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sweetness and balances the flavour.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling water into the mixture and stir well. Stirring thoroughly while adding the hot liquid spreads the flour or cornstarch evenly, preventing lumps. The starch then swells and thickens as the sauce heats, so it needs to be fully mixed in before boiling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, vinegar, 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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