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Dessert

Fruit Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with butter, sugar, corn starch, milk, lemon, wine, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fruit Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold milk, then pour it into the boiling water.

  3. Stir the mixture over heat until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and beat for five minutes.

  2. Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat almost to boiling.

  3. Add the wine and serve.

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

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps build a light texture.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture over heat until it thickens. Cornstarch only thickens fully when heated in liquid, and it can clump if added to hot liquid without being dissolved in cold milk first. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly rather than lumpily.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, corn, milk, wine. 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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