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Sauce

Lemon Sauce

A simple sauce made from sugar, lemon rind, water, and arrowroot.

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

Prepare

  1. Rub the sugar on the lemon rind until all the outer rind is removed.

  2. Put the sugar into the boiling water.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the arrowroot with the cold water.

  2. Pour the arrowroot mixture into the boiling water, return to the saucepan, and boil for one minute.

  3. Add the lemon juice.

  4. If the lemon is very large, add more sugar.

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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a glossy, smooth sauce when heated with it.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and absorbs oils from the lemon rind for extra lemon aroma.
Lemon
Provides acidity and bright flavour from the juice, and aroma from the rind.

The step that matters

Pouring the arrowroot mixture into the boiling water. Arrowroot must be fully suspended in cold water before it goes into hot liquid, or it clumps. Boiling it for a minute then swells and sets the starch granules so the sauce thickens evenly.

“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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