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Sauce

Wine Sauce for Puddings

A wine-based sauce made with sugar, water, cloves, lemon, mace, and wine, used for puddings.

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 medium heat, stirring to prevent burning.

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

  3. Remove from heat, stir in the wine, and strain 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 form a syrup and provides the sauce's sweetness and body.
Wine
Adds the main wine flavor and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and citrus aroma to balance the sweetness.
Whole cloves
Release warm, aromatic flavor into the simmering syrup.
Mace
Adds a warm, delicate spice aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the wine off the heat. Wine's alcohol and delicate aroma compounds evaporate quickly when heated, so adding it after removing the pan from heat helps keep its flavor in the sauce.

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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