Skip to main content
Dessert

Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with milk, sugar, egg, corn starch, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Pudding Sauce

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the sugar and egg yolk together in a bowl.

  2. Mix the corn starch with a little cold milk.

Cook the sauce

  1. Stir the corn starch mixture into the heated milk.

  2. Cook the mixture for 5 minutes, stirring constantly, then remove from heat.

Finish

  1. Fold in the beaten egg white and lemon 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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats in the liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sauce.
Egg
The yolk enriches and thickens the sauce, while the folded white adds lightness.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture while stirring constantly. Corn starch thickens as the liquid heats and gelatinizes its granules. Without constant stirring, the starch can settle, scorch on the bottom of the pan, or form lumps, leaving the sauce uneven in texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More pudding sauce recipes

Plum 71German 18Plain 16Sweet 16Cabinet 10Cottage 10 See all 364 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes