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Sauce

Plain Pudding Sauce

A clear lemon‑flavored sauce made from water, sugar, cornstarch, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Plain Pudding Sauce

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Plain Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine water, sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice in a double boiler.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil for a couple of minutes.

  3. Dissolve cornstarch in a small amount of water.

  4. Add the dissolved cornstarch to the boiling mixture.

  5. Boil until the sauce is clear.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce.

  2. Serve the sauce.

  3. Optionally, flavor with any good fruit juice.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Provides acidity and bright lemon flavor.

The step that matters

Adding the dissolved cornstarch to the boiling mixture. Cornstarch must be fully dissolved in cold water first, or it will clump. Adding it to boiling liquid and boiling until clear lets the starch swell and thicken evenly into a smooth sauce.

“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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