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Dessert

Sweet Sauce

A simple sweet sauce made with corn flour, sugar, water, and coconut butter or olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Sweet Sauce

Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix corn flour with sugar and cold water in a bowl.

  2. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and cook over medium heat until clear and thick.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in coconut butter or olive oil.

  4. Add flavoring to taste.

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. Corn + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + coconuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the sauce.
Coconut butter or olive oil
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Cook until clear and thick. Corn flour starch must be heated long enough to swell fully and thicken. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and starchy-tasting, while heating too hard or too long can scorch the bottom of the pan.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, flour, sugar. 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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