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Sauce

Rodnen Sauce — Currant Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, water, red wine, currants, ginger, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Rodnen Sauce — Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until it turns a pale brown.

  3. Add the water to thin the mixture and pour in the red wine.

  4. Mix in the currants, grated ginger, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  5. Sweeten with lump sugar and let simmer until the currants are soft.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Red wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together113 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and wine mixture into a sauce once cooked.
Butter
Provides fat for cooking the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Currants
Soften during simmering and give the sauce its fruity body and flavor.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the sauce to balance the tartness of the wine and lemon.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. The flour must cook in the melted butter until pale brown so its starch is fully cooked and the raw floury taste is removed. Adding liquid too early leaves lumps and a pasty flavor.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, red wine, ginger, lemon, sugar):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red wine, ginger, lemon, 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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