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Currant or Raspberry Sauce

A sweet sauce made from currants (and optional raspberries) thickened with arrowroot, served over pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Currant or Raspberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip the currants from their stalks, wash them if dusty, and drain.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a syrup by boiling the sugar and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the currants to the syrup and stew for 10 minutes.

  3. If using raspberries, add them to the syrup after the currants have been cooked for 2-3 minutes.

  4. Strain the juice through a sieve or folded muslin; you should have about ½ pint.

  5. Heat the juice again and mix it with the arrowroot that has been smoothly mixed with cold water, stirring constantly.

  6. Boil the mixture for 1 minute until transparent.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the pudding to cover it completely or serve it in a tureen.

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 + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main tart flavour and the colour of the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and balances the tartness of the currant juice.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a glossy, smooth sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot must be smoothly blended in cold water first and stirred constantly into hot juice, otherwise it clumps. Boiling it briefly until it turns transparent shows it has fully thickened.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, arrowroot. 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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