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Currant Sauce

Currant sauce is a sweet and tart sauce made with currants, butter, flour, water, red wine, lemon, ginger, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Currant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook gently until it turns light brown.

  3. Pour in the wine and water, and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, ginger, currants, and sugar to taste.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes and serve without straining.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Currant + red winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together113 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Flour
Cooks with the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds a toasty flavour.
Butter
Carries the flour in a roux and adds richness to the sauce.
Currants
Provide the main fruity flavour and sweetness of the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the liquid base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Brightens the sauce with acidity that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until light brown. The flour must cook in the melted butter long enough to lose its raw taste and form a stable roux, but not so long that it darkens too far. Stirring keeps it from scorching, and the roux is what thickens the liquid when the wine and water go in.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red wine, lemon, ginger, 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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