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Dessert

Maple-sugar Sauce

A hot sauce made from maple sugar, water, and butter, served with fruit pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Maple-sugar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the maple sugar into small bits.

  2. Put the sugar into a thick saucepan with cold water.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the saucepan over the fire until the sugar melts and forms a clear syrup.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in the butter until melted.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce hot with any fruit pudding.

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. Sugar + buttertop 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

Maple sugar
Provides the sweetness and maple flavour, and melts into the syrup base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture when stirred into the hot syrup.
Cold water
Dissolves the sugar as it heats, helping it melt evenly into a clear syrup.

The step that matters

Heating the sugar and water to a clear syrup. Heating over the fire must be steady so the sugar melts fully without scorching. Scorched sugar turns dark and bitter, and undissolved crystals leave a grainy sauce.

“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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