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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A sweet and tart sauce made with sugar, lemon, water, and arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Lemon 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 ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the sugar on the lemon rind until all the outer rind is removed.

  2. Put the sugar into the boiling water.

  3. Mix the arrowroot with the cold water.

Thicken and finish

  1. Pour the arrowroot mixture into the boiling water, return to the saucepan, and boil for one minute.

  2. Add the lemon juice.

  3. Adjust sugar if the lemon is large.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon 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 liquid into a smooth, glossy sauce when heated.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the lemon's acidity.
Lemon
Provides the sharp, fresh lemon flavour from its juice and aromatic oils from the rind.

The step that matters

Pour the arrowroot mixture into the boiling water. Arrowroot must be boiling when the slurry goes in, and then it needs to be boiled briefly. This activates the starch so it thickens fully. Adding it to a cooler liquid can leave the sauce thin or cloudy.

“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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