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Sauce

Sweet and Sour Sauce for Dumplings

A sweet and sour sauce made with sugar, water, butter, lemon juice, cornstarch or flour, egg yolks, salt, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet and Sour Sauce for Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar and water together in a pot.

  2. Add butter and lemon juice.

  3. Mix cornstarch or flour with cold water to make a paste, then add to the pot.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg yolks without cooking them.

  5. Heat the mixture on the back of the stove.

  6. Season with salt and cinnamon or your preferred flavor.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness that balances the sharp lemon juice.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that gives the sauce its sour note.
Cornstarch or flour
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Egg yolks
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and body.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg yolks without cooking them. Egg yolks thicken and can scramble if they get too hot. Adding them off the heat and heating gently on the back of the stove keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, egg, cinnamon. 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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