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Dessert

Jam Sauce

A raspberry jam sauce made by boiling jam, sugar, water, and lemon juice, then straining.

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

Jam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the raspberry jam, sugar, water and lemon juice in a saucepan.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. Substitute fresh raspberries for the jam if using them.

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

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

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

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

  3. 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, colour and fruit sweetness to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, and helps the sauce thicken as it boils.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and balances the sweetness.
Fresh raspberries
Add fresh, bright raspberry flavour in place of the jam, if used.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes. Boiling evaporates water, concentrating the sugar and fruit solids so the sauce thickens. Boiling too long can over-reduce it, making it stiff and overly sweet once it cools.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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