Name: Raspberry Sauce
Ingredients: 2 cups raspberries; ½ cup sugar; 2 tablespoons lemon juice; carmine (as needed for color); prepared custard (amount as needed)

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 ↓

Raspberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

Make the custard as directed.

Prepare the raspberry base

Pass the raspberries through a fine sieve.
Add the sugar and lemon juice to the raspberries.

Combine and freeze

Mix the mixture with the prepared custard.
Add carmine to achieve a bright red color.
Freeze the mixture in the usual way.

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.

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

Raspberries: Provide the main flavor and red color base, and the pulp that gives the sauce body.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps soften the texture of the frozen mixture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the raspberry flavor and balances the sweetness.
Prepared custard: Supplies richness and creaminess, giving the frozen mixture its body.

“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.