Name: Jam Sauce
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons jam; ½ cup water; 1 ounce castor sugar; ⅓ cup claret; juice of 1 lemon; carmine (for coloring)

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Jam Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the jam, sugar, and water together.
Add the claret and lemon juice.
Color with carmine.
Strain and serve.

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.

Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Jam: Provides the fruit flavor and body that the sauce is built on.
Castor sugar: Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the lemon and claret.
Claret: Adds wine flavor and acidity to the sauce.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances sweetness.

“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.