Skip to main content
Sauce

Brandy Sauce

A sweet sauce made with water, brandy, sugar, cornflour, and optional nutmeg.

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

Why it works: Brandy and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,311 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Brandy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the cornflour smoothly with a little of the water.

  2. In a copper saucepan, combine the remaining water and sugar.

  3. Boil and reduce to a thin syrup, skimming occasionally.

  4. Add the cornflour mixture to the syrup and stir until it boils.

  5. Stir in the brandy and 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. Brandy + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Loaf sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup and provides sweetness.
Cornflour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells and sets when the sauce comes to the boil.
Brandy
Adds its alcohol-based aroma and flavour, stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the cornflour mixture to the syrup. Cornflour only thickens once the starch reaches a boil, and it clumps if added unmixed. Keeping it as a smooth slurry and stirring while it boils gives an even, lump-free sauce.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, 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.

More brandy sauce recipes

Lemon 3Peach 3 See all 90 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes