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Dessert

Fruit Sauce

Fruit sauce made with fruit juice, sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch thickened in a saucepan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Fruit Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix cornstarch with a little cold water until smooth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine fruit juice, sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Add the cornstarch mixture to the saucepan.

  3. Boil for a few moments, stirring constantly.

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. 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the juice into a smooth sauce when heated and boiled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the juice and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the fruit juice.
Fruit juice
Provides the main fruit flavour and liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce while stirring constantly. Cornstarch only thickens fully once it reaches a boil. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed so it does not clump or scorch on the bottom of the pan.

“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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