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Dessert

Jam Sauce

A sweet sauce made from apricot jam, water, sugar, sherry, lemon rind, and carmine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Jam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine water, sugar, jam, and lemon rind.

  2. Cook gently for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the sherry, strain the mixture, and then add the carmine.

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. Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together173 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  3. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. 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

Apricot jam
Provides fruit flavour and body, and adds sweetness to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce a smooth, syrupy body.
Sherry
Adds a fortified wine aroma and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Lemon rind
Adds a fresh citrus aroma that brightens the sweetness of the sauce.
Carmine
Adds a red colour to the sauce without changing its flavour.

The step that matters

Cook gently for 10 minutes. Gentle heat dissolves the sugar and softens the jam and rind without scorching. Boiling hard can burn the sugar and make the sauce bitter and too thick.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar, sherry. 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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