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Sauce

Wine Sauce

A sauce made with water, lemon peel, sugar, arrowroot, lemon juice, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Wine Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine water, lemon peel, and lump sugar.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then remove the lemon peel.

  3. Strain the lemon juice into the arrowroot and mix until smooth.

  4. Add the arrowroot mixture to the sauce and stir well.

  5. Remove the sauce from the heat and gradually stir in the sherry before serving.

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 + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, glossy body.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon and sherry.
Sherry
Adds wine flavour and aroma to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can clump if added to hot liquid without first being smoothed in cold liquid. Mixing it into the lemon juice until smooth before adding it to the sauce helps it disperse evenly and thicken without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot, sherry. 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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