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Sauce

Milk-pudding Sauce

A sauce made from eggs, sugar, butter, milk, arrowroot or cornstarch, and nutmeg or mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Milk-pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the eggs until stiff.

  2. Rub the butter into the sugar.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and mix to a creamy froth.

  4. Wet the cornstarch with cold milk and add it along with the spice.

  5. Gradually pour in the boiling milk while beating continuously.

  6. Place the mixture in a saucepan of boiling water for 5 minutes, stirring constantly without letting it boil.

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. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the sauce as they set and give it a rich, creamy body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps create a creamy froth when beaten with the butter.
Arrowroot or cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture so the sauce becomes smooth and glossy rather than runny.

The step that matters

Heating without boiling. Egg proteins set and can curdle if overheated, and the cornstarch needs heat to thicken. Stirring constantly in gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and prevents it from boiling and separating.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

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