Skip to main content
Dessert

Strawberry Sauce

A sweet sauce made from strawberry marmalade, water, lemon juice, and optional corn starch thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,927 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pass the strawberry marmalade through a sieve.

  2. Add the water and lemon juice to taste.

  3. If a thicker sauce is desired, dissolve the corn starch in water and stir it into the boiling mixture.

  4. Boil for a few moments until thickened.

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 + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  2. Strawberry + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Strawberry + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberry marmalade
Forms the sauce's base, providing the fruit flavor and sweetness.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as its granules swell and gelatinize when heated in liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor and balances its sweetness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn starch. Corn starch clumps if added as dry powder, so it must be fully dissolved in cold water first. Stirring that slurry into the boiling mixture lets the granules disperse evenly, and boiling then swells them to thicken the sauce.

Swap the strawberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, corn):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Strawberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, corn. 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.

More strawberry sauce recipes

Raspberry 3 See all 69 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesStrawberry Ice CreamStrawberry Ice Cream122 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes