Skip to main content
Sauce

Red Cherry Arrowroot Sauce

A sweet sauce made from red cherries, syrup, lemon juice, and arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Red Cherry Arrowroot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pass the pitted cherries through a sieve.

  2. Boil the syrup until it reduces slightly.

  3. Add the sieved cherries, cochineal, and lemon juice to the syrup.

  4. Thicken the mixture slightly with arrowroot.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Syrup + arrowroottop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Red cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and body of the sauce.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and reduces to concentrate the flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cherry flavour.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce to a glossy, pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture slightly with arrowroot. Arrowroot thickens when heated and sets as the sauce cools. Adding too much, or boiling it for too long after adding it, can make the sauce gluey or cause it to lose thickness. Add it gradually and keep the heat moderate.

“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

Arrowroot SauceArrowroot Sauce18 recipesHot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes