Skip to main content
Dessert

Rhubarb Sauce

A sweet sauce made from rhubarb and sugar, cooked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle the rhubarb generously with sugar and shake well to combine.

  2. Let the mixture stand until the sugar is moist with juice.

Cook

  1. Heat the rhubarb slowly on the back of the range until tender, without stirring.

  2. If the sauce is too watery, uncover during the latter part of cooking.

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. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb
Forms the sauce's body and supplies its tart, sharp flavor as it softens.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balances rhubarb's tartness, and draws out juice to help it cook down.

The step that matters

Heat the rhubarb slowly without stirring. Gentle, slow heat softens the pieces evenly without scorching the bottom of the pan. Stirring can break the rhubarb apart and make the sauce cloudy and mushy, so leave it alone until the pieces are tender.

“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.

You might also like

Rhubarb PieRhubarb Pie152 recipesRhubarb MarmaladeRhubarb Marmalade35 recipesRhubarb JellyRhubarb Jelly28 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes