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Raisin Sauce

A sauce made with fat, flour, soup, raisins, almonds, lemon, vinegar, sugar, spices, optional horseradish and rye crust, served with beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Raisin Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a skillet, brown the fat or butter.

  2. Stir in the flour until it forms a smooth paste.

  3. Gradually add the hot soup while stirring constantly.

  4. Add the raisins, pounded almonds, lemon slices, vinegar, brown sugar, cloves, and cinnamon.

  5. If desired, grate in some horseradish and the crust of a rye loaf.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with fat 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms a smooth paste with the browned fat that thickens the sauce as the soup is added.
Raisins
Add sweetness and plump softness to the sauce as they absorb liquid.
Pounded almonds
Add body and a nutty richness that thickens the sauce slightly.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the raisins and brown sugar.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and caramel notes that offset the sharpness of the vinegar and lemon.

The step that matters

Add the hot soup gradually while stirring constantly. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour paste smooth. Dumping it in at once lets starch clump into lumps that are hard to whisk out.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, raisin, almond, vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, almond, vinegar, sugar, clove, 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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