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Dessert

Sweet Sauce

A sweet sauce made with butter, sugar, flour, water, raisins, almonds, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Sweet Sauce

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Brown the butter and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir.

  3. Add the water and let it boil.

Add fruit and cream

  1. Add the raisins and chopped almonds.

  2. Stir in the cream.

  3. Boil for 30 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.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and, when browned, a nutty flavour to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and browns with the butter to deepen its colour and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce becomes body rather than runny.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture.
Almonds
Add crunch and a toasted, nutty flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body.

The step that matters

Brown the butter and sugar. Butter and sugar can go from golden to burnt quickly over medium heat. Burnt sugar turns bitter and dark, so the sauce needs steady stirring and close attention while it browns.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, almond, cream. 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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