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Dessert

Maple Sugar Sauce

A sweet sauce made from maple sugar, butter, flour, and water, boiled and served with puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Melt the sugar in the water over low heat.

  2. Remove any scum that forms on the surface.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the butter with the flour.

  2. Add the butter-flour mixture to the sugar-water mixture.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Serve with boiled puddings.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to provide sweetness and body for the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Add the butter-flour mixture to the sugar-water mixture. Flour mixed with fat first disperses more evenly, so it is less likely to form lumps when it meets the hot liquid. Boiling then cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the flour thicken the sauce evenly.

“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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