Skip to main content
Sauce

Claret Sauce

A sauce made with claret, eggs, red currant jelly, spices, sugar, arrowroot, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 166 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Claret Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Thicken the claret

  1. Blend the arrowroot with a little water.

  2. Add some claret and stir until it boils.

Finish and serve

  1. In a pan, combine the rest of the claret with the beaten eggs and all other ingredients.

  2. Whip the sauce quickly until frothy and just about to boil.

  3. Pour it over a hot pudding.

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. Cinnamon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Currant + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Thicken the sauce when gently heated and add richness and body.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving a smooth, glossy sauce.
Claret
Provides the main flavour and a fruity acidity to the sauce.
Red-currant jelly
Adds sweetness, fruitiness and body to the sauce.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Whipping the sauce just before boiling. Beaten eggs thicken as they heat but scramble if they get too hot. Stopping at the point just before boiling, while whisking, lets the eggs and arrowroot set into a smooth, frothy sauce rather than a curdled one.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cinnamon, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Currant Jelly SauceCurrant Jelly Sauce32 recipesArrowroot SauceArrowroot Sauce18 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes