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Sauce

Black Currant Sauce

A sauce made by stewing black currants with sugar, sherry, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the black currants with sugar, sherry, and lemon for 5 to 6 minutes over the fire.

  2. Serve warm or at room temperature.

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. Black currant + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  4. Black currant + sherrytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 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

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and tartness, and break down into the body of the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the black currants.
Sherry
Adds a wine-like aroma and depth of flavour to the sauce.

Swap the black currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, sherry, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, lemon. 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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