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Dessert

Arrowroot Sauce

A sweet sauce made from arrowroot, sugar, water, and vanilla essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Arrowroot Sauce

Why it works: Arrowroot and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 242 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the water in a pot.

  2. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water until it reaches a thick cream consistency.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the arrowroot mixture to the boiling water and cook for a few minutes.

  2. Stir in the sugar and vanilla essence.

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. Arrowroot + vanillatop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 as its starch swells when heated, giving a glossy, smooth sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture to the boiling water. The arrowroot must be fully smooth before it goes in. When starch meets hot liquid it swells and thickens quickly, so any unmixed lumps will set into the sauce and stay there.

“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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