Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Pudding Sauce

A simple lemon sauce made with lemon juice, water, cornstarch, sugar, and optional lemon extract.

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

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Juice the lemon and add the juice to 2 cups of water.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Thicken the sauce by whisking in 1 tablespoon of cornstarch.

Finish and flavor

  1. Sweeten to taste with sugar.

  2. Add a few drops of lemon extract if desired.

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemon juice
Provides the bright acidity and main lemon flavor of the sauce.
Water
Forms the liquid base that the cornstarch thickens.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as its starch granules swell in the heated liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Whisking in the cornstarch. Whisk the cornstarch into the hot liquid so it disperses without lumps. Starch granules swell and thicken the liquid only once heated, so the mixture needs to reach a boil for the sauce to set properly.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes