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Pudding Sauce

A simple sauce made by beating sugar with boiling milk and adding flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Pudding Sauce

Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the sugar until well combined.

  2. Pour in the boiling milk and beat until light.

  3. Add your choice of 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.

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, when beaten, helps give it a smooth, light body.
Milk
Adds moisture and dissolves the sugar into a fluid, pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling milk and beat until light. The hot milk must be poured in while the sugar is still being beaten so the sugar dissolves evenly. Beating in air at this stage lightens the texture of the 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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