Skip to main content
Sauce

Arrowroot Sauce, Clear

A clear sauce thickened with arrowroot, flavored with cider and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Sauce, Clear

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the flavoring ingredient in the cider for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix the arrowroot smoothly with a little cold water.

  3. Strain the cider into the arrowroot mixture, stirring continuously.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan.

  5. Add sugar to taste and simmer gently for 4 to 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. 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.

  1. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cider + cinnamontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the cider liquid into a smooth, glossy sauce as it heats.
Cider
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavor of the simmered ingredients.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus flavor to the cider as it simmers.

The step that matters

Strain the cider into the arrowroot mixture, stirring continuously. Arrowroot forms lumps if it meets hot liquid without constant stirring, and it must be fully dispersed in cold water first so the starch thickens evenly as the sauce heats.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, arrowroot, sugar, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

Cider SauceCider Sauce15 recipesHot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes