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Spicy Raisin Sauce

A sweet and spicy sauce made with raisins, sugar, vinegar, and spices, served with ham or tongue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Spicy Raisin Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cook sugar and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Add raisins, butter, and vinegar.

  3. Stir in Worcestershire sauce, salt, cloves, mace, and pepper.

  4. Cook until the jelly melts.

Serve

  1. Serve with ham or tongue.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body, giving the sauce its syrupy character.
Raisins
Soften in the liquid, adding chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sweetness and balances the sauce.
Tart fruit jelly
Melts into the sauce, adding tartness and pectin that helps it thicken.

The step that matters

Cook until the jelly melts. Heat should be moderate so the jelly melts smoothly into the sauce. Overheating can scorch the sugar and make the sauce taste bitter and dark.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, raisin, butter, vinegar, sauce, clove, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, butter, vinegar, sauce, clove, pepper. 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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