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Sauce

Marmalade Sauce

A sweet sauce made with marmalade, cornflour, sugar, water, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Marmalade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the slurry

  1. Mix the cornflour with the milk.

Cook the sauce

  1. Pour the mixture into boiling water.

  2. Add the marmalade, sugar, and a little butter.

  3. Transfer to a saucepan and bring to a boil.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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.
Marmalade
Adds the main flavour, with sweetness and a bitter-citrus acidity.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the marmalade's tartness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and a glossy finish.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and is mixed with the cornflour to disperse it.

The step that matters

Mix the cornflour with the milk first. Cornflour clumps when added dry or straight to hot liquid. Dispersing it in cold milk first lets the starch granules separate, so they swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly when it reaches a boil.

“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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