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Sauce

Cabinet Pudding Sauce

A sauce made from egg yolks, lemon, butter, sugar, wine, and spice, cooked over a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cabinet Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Whip the egg yolks lightly.

  2. Express the lemon juice and grate the lemon zest.

  3. Mix the sugar and butter together.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the egg yolks, spice, and lemon juice to the mixture.

  2. Beat for 15 minutes.

  3. Stir in the wine.

  4. Immerse the mixture in a saucepan of boiling water, beating while it heats.

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 + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder, silkier texture and richer flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts its richness.
Wine
Adds depth of flavour and a little acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture over boiling water while beating. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat but can curdle or scramble if they overheat or sit still. Constant beating spreads the heat evenly and keeps the sauce smooth as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, wine. 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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