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Sauce

Cream Sauce

A thickened sauce made with cream, arrowroot, milk, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Cream Sauce

Why it works: Arrowroot and pepper work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 329 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix the arrowroot with the cold milk until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the boiling cream to the arrowroot mixture, stirring continuously.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Heat the mixture over the fire until it just boils, then serve immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Cream
Provides richness and body, giving the sauce its smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Heat until it just boils, then serve. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can thin out if boiled for too long, so stop heating as soon as the sauce just boils and serve right away.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, pepper. 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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