Skip to main content
Sauce

Corn Flour Sauce

A thickened sauce made with cornflour, boiling water, sugar, and lemon juice or red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Flour Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the cornflour with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Pour in the boiling water while stirring continuously.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice or red currant jelly.

  4. Boil the mixture for five minutes.

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 + 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

Cornflour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the lemon or jelly.
Lemon juice or red currant jelly
Adds acidity and fruity flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the cornflour with cold water before adding boiling water. Starch clumps if it hits hot liquid directly. Mixing it smooth with cold water first lets the granules disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps when stirred.

“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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes