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Sauce

Arrowroot Sauce, Clear

A clear sauce made with cider, arrowroot, sugar, and optional flavorings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 166 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Sauce, Clear

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer the flavoring ingredient in the cider for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix the arrowroot smoothly with a little cold water.

  3. Strain the cider into the arrowroot while stirring.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan.

  5. Add sugar to taste and simmer gently for 4 to 5 minutes.

  6. Serve.

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. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cider + cinnamontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

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

  5. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 clear, glossy sauce without clouding it.
Cider
Forms the liquid base and carries the sauce's main flavor.

The step that matters

Strain the cider into the arrowroot while stirring. Arrowroot thickens only when hot liquid is stirred into it evenly. Stirring while pouring prevents lumps, which would leave the sauce grainy instead of smooth and clear.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, sugar, cinnamon. 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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