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Sauce

Currant Sauce

A sauce made with currants, milk, cream, sweet wine, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the currants in the milk for a few minutes.

  2. Add the cream, sweet wine, flour, and butter.

  3. Stir until the mixture is smooth.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Currants
Give the sauce its tart, fruity flavour as they simmer in the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and carries the currant flavour through the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, full texture from its fat.
Sweet wine
Adds sweetness and a fruity aroma to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the warm liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Stir until the mixture is smooth. Flour added to warm liquid can form lumps as its starch clumps before it disperses. Stirring keeps the starch evenly spread so it thickens the sauce smoothly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, wine, flour, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, wine, flour, butter. 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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