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Sauce

Jam Sauce

A sweet and tart sauce made with jam, cornflour, water, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Jam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the remaining water with the jam.

  2. Pour the boiling jam mixture onto the cornflour, stirring well.

  3. Return the mixture to the saucepan with the sugar and boil for about 8 minutes.

  4. Add the lemon juice and strain before serving.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Cornflour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated in liquid.
Jam
Provides sweetness and the main fruit flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and rounds out the tartness of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling jam onto the cornflour. Cornflour mixed with water must be stirred in well as the hot liquid goes in, so the starch disperses evenly. If it is not stirred, the starch clumps in hot liquid and the sauce ends up lumpy and unevenly thickened.

“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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