Name: Arrowroot Sauce, Clear
Ingredients: ½ pint of cider (or equal quantities of wine and water, or any kind of fruit juice); 2 teaspoons of arrowroot; sugar to taste; cinnamon (or other flavoring ingredient); lemon rind (or other flavoring ingredient)

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 ↓

Arrowroot Sauce, Clear

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

½ pint of cider (or equal quantities of wine and water, or any kind of fruit juice)
2 teaspoons of arrowroot
sugar to taste
cinnamon (or other flavoring ingredient)
lemon rind (or other flavoring ingredient)

Directions

Prepare

Simmer the flavoring ingredient in the cider for 10 minutes.
Mix the arrowroot smoothly with a little cold water.

Thicken and serve

Strain the cider into the arrowroot mixture, stirring continuously.
Return the mixture to the saucepan and add sugar to taste.
Simmer gently for 4 to 5 minutes, then serve.

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.

Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together553 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together166 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Cider + cinnamontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,497 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Arrowroot: Starch that thickens the liquid into a clear, glossy sauce when heated.
Cider: Forms the liquid base and carries fruity flavour into the sauce.
Sugar: Adds sweetness, adjusted to taste.
Lemon rind: Adds fragrant citrus aroma as it steeps in the cider.
Cinnamon: Adds warm spice aroma as it steeps in the liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot mixture into the hot cider. Arrowroot starch clumps if it meets hot liquid without constant stirring. Continuous stirring disperses the starch evenly so it thickens smoothly as the sauce simmers.

Swap the lemon

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

Vanillafits better
Applefits better
Raisinfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, arrowroot, sugar, cinnamon. 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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Arrowroot Sauce, Clear