Skip to main content
Sauce

Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made from sugar, butter, wine, nutmeg, and boiling milk.

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

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until smooth.

  2. Add the wine and flavor with nutmeg.

  3. Stir in boiling milk until the mixture is thick like cream.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately and stir well before serving.

  2. Do not add the wine until the mixture is completely cool.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps give the sauce a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture when creamed with sugar.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic flavor to the sauce.
Boiling milk
Supplies the liquid that, with heat, thickens the sauce into a creamy consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the wine. Heat drives off much of the alcohol and aroma from wine, so the timing of its addition controls how much flavor remains. The record's steps conflict on this: one says to add the wine before the milk, another says not to add it until the mixture is completely cool. Follow the timing the cook intends.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, wine, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, wine, milk. 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 pudding sauce recipes

Plum 71German 18Plain 16Sweet 16Cabinet 10Cottage 10 See all 364 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes