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Wine Sauce

A sweet sauce made from raspberry jam, sherry, water, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Wine Sauce

Why it works: Raspberry and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine raspberry jam, water, sherry, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Stir until boiling.

  3. Boil until the sauce thickens and becomes syrupy.

  4. Add lemon juice and strain the sauce.

  5. Bottle the sauce for later use.

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. Raspberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Raspberry + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Raspberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

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

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

Raspberry jam
Provides the main raspberry flavour and sweetness, and some body as the sauce cooks.
Sherry
Adds aroma and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the sauce thicken into a syrup as it reduces.

The step that matters

Boil until the sauce thickens and becomes syrupy. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugars, so the sauce thickens as it reduces. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while overcooking can make it too sticky or sugary once it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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