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Sauce

Sweet Sauce

A sweet sauce made with potato flour, water, boiling water, sugar or treacle, butter, lemon juice, and optional spices or jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Sweet Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and raspberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the potato flour with 4 tablespoons of water until smooth.

  2. Stir in ½ pint of boiling water.

  3. Add sugar or treacle to taste.

  4. Cook over heat until the sauce boils.

Finish and vary

  1. If desired, stir in 1 ounce of butter and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  2. For variation, use nutmeg or cinnamon instead of lemon juice, or add raspberry jam or fruit syrup.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

French potato flour
Thickens the water into a smooth sauce as it heats and boils.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Raspberry jam or fruit syrup
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the potato flour with cold water until smooth. Starch clumps if it meets hot liquid undispersed. Mixing it smooth in cold water first lets the granules spread evenly, so when the boiling water goes in and the sauce cooks, it thickens without lumps.

Swap the raspberry

The recipe marks raspberry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, sugar, butter, lemon):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, sugar, butter, lemon. 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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