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Sauce

Cream Sauce for Vegetables

A thin cream and vegetable stock sauce thickened with arrowroot, seasoned with salt, lemon juice, and optional green herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream Sauce for Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cream and vegetable stock.

  2. Stir in the arrowroot and heat until it thickens.

  3. Season with salt and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. If desired, omit the green herbs.

  2. Serve with asparagus, artichokes, young carrots, turnips, marrows, or various beans.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + arrowroottop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Thin cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, fatty mouthfeel.
Vegetable stock
Provides the liquid base and savory flavor for the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce as it heats, without making it cloudy.

The step that matters

Heating the arrowroot. Arrowroot thickens when heated, but it can break down and thin if overheated or held at a boil for long. Heat only until the sauce thickens and then stop.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, arrowroot):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, arrowroot. 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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