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Sauce

Common Wine Sauce

A buttery wine sauce sweetened with sugar, optionally flavored with lemon zest or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Common Wine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, sweeten ½ cup of melted butter with 1½ ounces of sugar.

  2. Gradually add ⅓ cup of wine while stirring.

  3. Heat the mixture until it is just about to boil.

  4. Serve immediately, adding lemon zest or nutmeg if desired.

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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the acidity of the wine.
Wine
Provides acidity and flavour that give the sauce its character.

The step that matters

Heat until just about to boil. If the sauce boils, the emulsion of butter and wine can separate and turn greasy or grainy. Heating gently keeps it smooth and cohesive.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, wine. 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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