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Sauce

Plain Hot Pudding Sauce

A simple sauce made from flour, sugar, butter, and flavoring, boiled with water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Plain Hot Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt together.

  2. Slowly pour the boiling water into the mixture, stirring continuously.

  3. Let it boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the creamed butter and your choice of flavoring.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Flour
Starch thickens the sauce as it heats and boils, giving it body.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and helps make the sauce a smooth, pourable syrup.
Butter
Adds fat for richness, smooth mouthfeel and a glossy finish.
Boiling water
Liquid that dissolves the sugar and hydrates the flour starch so it can thicken.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling water slowly while stirring. Flour clumps when hot liquid hits it all at once. Pouring slowly and stirring disperses the starch granules, so the sauce thickens smoothly as it boils instead of turning lumpy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy. 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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