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Sauce

Sweet Sauce

A sauce made from butter, flour, water, optional wine, lemon peel, suet, nutmeg, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Sweet Sauce

Why it works: Walnut and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with the melted butter until well combined.

  3. Add the water and stir continuously until it boils.

Finish and season

  1. For a variation, mix flour with water, add wine, lemon peel, suet, nutmeg, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Stir until combined, adding more water if too thick.

  3. Adjust flavor with lemon juice or essence of almonds if desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Walnut + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Melted fat that carries flavor and gives the sauce a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Add the water and stir continuously until it boils. Flour thickens only when its starch is evenly dispersed and heated. Stirring while adding the water prevents lumps, and the sauce must reach a boil for the starch to swell fully and thicken.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, wine, lemon, nutmeg, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, wine, lemon, nutmeg, sugar. 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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