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Sauce

Plain Hot Pudding Sauce

A simple sauce made from flour, sugar, butter, water, salt, and optional flavorings, boiled to thicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Plain Hot Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, and salt together in a bowl.

  2. Slowly pour the boiling water into the mixture, stirring constantly.

  3. Let it boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the creamed butter and your chosen flavoring.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, pourable sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it body as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stirring while adding the boiling water. Pouring the water in slowly while stirring constantly keeps flour from clumping into lumps. Smooth dispersion lets the starch thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy. 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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