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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A simple lemon sauce made by boiling sugar and water, thickening with arrowroot, and adding lemon juice.

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

Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar and water together for 10 minutes.

  2. Moisten the arrowroot with a little cold water.

  3. Pour the moistened arrowroot over the sugar mixture.

  4. Add the lemon juice and boil for 5 minutes. Serve.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

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

Lump sugar
Provides the sweetness and the body of the syrup base.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity and bright aroma that balance the sweetness.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving a glossy, smooth texture.

The step that matters

Moisten the arrowroot fully before adding it. Arrowroot must be dispersed in cold water first, or it forms lumps when it hits the hot syrup. Once heated, its starch swells and thickens the liquid, so the slurry needs to be smooth before it goes in.

“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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