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Sauce

Wine Sauce for Puddings

A sweet wine sauce made with sugar, water, wine, cloves, lemon, and mace, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Wine Sauce for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the sugar in the water over low heat, stirring to prevent burning.

  2. Add the cloves and lemon (cut into pieces, seeds removed) and let simmer to infuse flavors.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the wine, then strain the sauce before serving.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Wine + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-isoeugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. 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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the water to sweeten the sauce and give it body as a syrup.
Wine
Adds acidity and fruity aroma that define the sauce's flavor.
Lemon
Contributes acidity and bright citrus aroma from its peel and juice.
Whole cloves
Release warm, aromatic compounds into the syrup during simmering.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar over low heat. Sugar can scorch quickly if heated too hard or left unstirred. Scorched sugar turns bitter and dark, spoiling the flavor of the whole sauce, so low heat and constant stirring keep it clear and sweet.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, wine, clove, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine, clove, lemon. 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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