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Dessert

Sauce for Plum Pudding

A sweet sauce made from sugar, water, cinnamon, lemon, and cloves, boiled and reduced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sauce for Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve 6 ounces of granulated sugar in ½ cup of boiling water.

  2. Add a stick of cinnamon, a little lemon, and 2 cloves, then boil for 10 minutes.

Brown the sugar

  1. In a separate pan, dissolve 2 teaspoons of white sugar in 1 tablespoon of boiling water over moderate heat, then stir until it turns light brown.

Combine and finish

  1. Pour the boiled sugar mixture over the light brown sugar, bring to a boil, then remove from heat.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves to form the sweet base of the sauce.
White sugar
Browns into caramel, adding colour and a deeper, richer flavour.
Cinnamon stick
Infuses a warm, sweet aroma into the syrup as it boils.
Cloves
Adds a pungent, warm spice aroma to the sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the white sugar. Sugar moves from pale gold to bitter and burnt within seconds. Stir constantly over moderate heat and remove it as soon as it reaches light brown, because residual heat keeps darkening it.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, clove. 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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