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Dessert

Vanilla Sauce

A simple vanilla sauce made with boiling water, corn starch, butter, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and nutmeg, served over puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Vanilla Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Wet the corn starch in cold water.

  2. Stir the wet corn starch into the boiling water with the sugar and cook until clear.

  3. Add the butter and beat for one minute.

  4. Stir in the vanilla and nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Serve over plain puddings like rice or bread.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Vanilla + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body and a smooth, glossy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and adds body as it dissolves in the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the starch until clear. Cornstarch must be stirred into boiling liquid and cooked through so its granules swell and thicken fully. Stirring the wet starch in prevents lumps, and cooking until clear shows the starch has gelatinized and lost its raw, chalky taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, butter, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg. 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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