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Dessert

Red Currant or Raspberry Sauce

A sweet sauce made from red currants, sugar, water, and arrowroot, optionally flavored with raspberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Red Currant or Raspberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash and drain the red currants.

  2. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water; boil gently for 5 minutes to create a syrup.

  3. Add the currants to the syrup and stew for 10 minutes.

  4. If using raspberries, add them to the syrup 2-3 minutes after the currants.

  5. Strain the juice through a fine sieve or muslin; you should have about ½ pint.

Thicken and serve

  1. Heat the juice again; mix arrowroot with cold water until smooth.

  2. Stir the arrowroot mixture into the hot juice, whisking briskly.

  3. Boil for 1 minute until the sauce is transparent.

  4. Pour the sauce over the pudding to cover it completely or serve in a tureen.

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. Red currant + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the tart fruit flavour and the juice that forms the body of the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and balances the sharp acidity of the currants.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a glossy, clear sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Whisking the arrowroot into the hot juice. Arrowroot must be fully dispersed in cold water first and whisked in briskly, or it clumps. Boiling it briefly then sets the starch so the sauce thickens and turns clear.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot. 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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