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Sauce

Sweet Sauce

A simple lemon-flavored sauce made by boiling water with lemon peel, then thickening with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Sweet Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,404 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the water in a pot.

  2. Add the lemon peel and boil for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Remove the lemon peel from the water.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the flour on a plate in the oven to warm.

  2. Combine the warm flour with the boiling water, stirring until smooth.

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. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Lemon peel
Adds a fragrant citrus aroma to the infused water.

The step that matters

Combining the flour with the boiling water. Flour starch clumps when it hits hot liquid without being dispersed. Stirring separates the granules so they hydrate evenly and thicken into a smooth sauce.

“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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