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Wine Sauce for Peabody Pudding

A wine sauce made with loaf sugar, butter, brandy, sherry, citrus, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,634 recipes mention both. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine Sauce for Peabody Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pulverize the loaf sugar.

  2. Stir the sugar with the fresh butter for half an hour.

  3. Add the French brandy and sherry wine and mix well.

  4. Rub the sugar on the lemon and orange, then pound and mix it into the sauce.

Serve

  1. Grate nutmeg over the top before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Brandy + sherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Sweetens the sauce and dissolves into the butter to give it body.
Fresh butter
Provides the rich fat that carries the sauce's texture and flavour.
French brandy
Adds aroma and a warm alcoholic bite to the sauce.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar into the butter. Creaming sugar and butter for a long period incorporates air and dissolves the sugar grains, giving the sauce a smooth, light texture rather than a grainy one.

Flavor stand-ins for the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, brandy, sherry, wine, lemon, orange):

  1. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Rosemaryabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, brandy, sherry, wine, lemon, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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