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Sauce

Corn Flour Sauce

A simple sauce made with corn flour, boiling water, sugar, and lemon juice or red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Flour Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix 1 teaspoon of corn flour with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Pour in ½ cup of boiling water while stirring continuously.

  3. Add 2 teaspoons of sugar and the juice of 1 lemon or 2 tablespoons of red currant jelly.

  4. Boil the mixture together for 5 minutes.

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. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Corn flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets in the hot liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sauce.
Lemon juice or red currant jelly
Adds acidity or fruity sweetness and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water while stirring. Cornstarch clumps if it is not dispersed evenly before it heats. Stirring continuously spreads the starch through the liquid so that, as the granules heat, they swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, flour, 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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