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Dessert

Sago Sauce for Sweet Puddings

A sweet sauce made from sago, water, port or sherry, lemon, sugar, and optional cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sago Sauce for Sweet Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the sago in two or three waters.

  2. Put the sago into a saucepan with the water and lemon peel.

  3. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the lemon peel, then add the remaining ingredients.

  5. Bring to a boil and serve, straining the lemon juice before adding.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sherry + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Sago
Swells in the simmering liquid and thickens the sauce into a light, translucent body.
Port or sherry
Adds fortified wine sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Lemon
Its rind gives aromatic oil and its juice adds acidity that brightens the sweet wine.

The step that matters

Simmer the sago gently. Starch grains swell and thicken as they heat, but a hard boil can break them up unevenly and leave the sauce cloudy or lumpy. Gentle heat lets the sago cook through evenly.

“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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