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Dessert

Raspberry Sauce

A sauce made from raspberries, sugar, water, arrowroot, and light wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and arrowroot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,073 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Raspberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place the raspberries in a jar with the cold water.

  2. Put the jar in a saucepan of boiling water and let it sit until the juice flows freely.

  3. Strain the mixture.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a little water to form a paste, then add it to the strained juice along with the wine and sugar.

  2. Heat the mixture in a pan until it reaches the boiling point, 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.

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. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  2. Arrowroot + winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together153 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Raspberries
Provide the main fruit flavor, color, and the juice that forms the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a glossy sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Light wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the raspberry flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the raspberries.

The step that matters

Mixing the arrowroot paste into the juice. Arrowroot starch clumps if added dry or unmixed. Mixing it into a paste with cold water first lets it disperse evenly, so it thickens smoothly when the sauce reaches a boil.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine. 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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