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Sauce

Red Currant Jelly Sauce

A sauce made by melting red currant jelly, adding brandy, and sweetening with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Red Currant Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the red currant jelly in a saucepan.

  2. Add the brandy and stir until combined.

  3. Sweeten with syrup to your taste.

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. Red currant + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Brandy + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together561 recipes
  3. Red currant + syruptop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together76 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant jelly
Provides the main fruit flavour, body and sweetness, and sets the sauce's thickness as it melts.
Brandy
Adds aromatic depth and a sharp alcoholic note that balances the sweetness of the jelly.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, syrup. 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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