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Ratafia Pudding and Sauce

A sweet sauce made with arrowroot, sugar, brandy, and almond essence, served over pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ratafia Pudding and Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Moisten the arrowroot with a little water.

  2. Boil the sugar in the water for ten minutes.

  3. Mix the arrowroot with the boiled sugar and stir over the fire for two minutes.

  4. Add the brandy and essence of sweet almonds.

  5. Serve the sauce over the pudding.

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 + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Brandy + almondtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,969 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Arrowroot + brandytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together141 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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 sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, glossy body.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, dissolved in boiling water, forms a syrup base.
Brandy
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot into the boiled sugar. Arrowroot thickens when heated with liquid, so it must be stirred continuously while cooking to prevent lumps and to reach a smooth, even consistency.

“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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