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Dessert

Maple Sugar Sauce

A sweet sauce made from maple sugar, water, walnut meal, flour, and vanilla or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine maple sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer for 30 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  3. Stir in walnut meal.

Thicken and flavour

  1. Mix flour with a little cold water until smooth, then add to the sauce.

  2. Add vanilla or grated nutmeg to taste.

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

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

  2. Walnut + vanillatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,730 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Maple sugar
Provides the main sweetness and the deep maple flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Walnut meal
Adds body and a nutty flavour, with some fat that softens the texture.
Vanilla
Adds a rounded aroma that complements the maple flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour mixed in cold water disperses without lumps, while dry flour clumps. Starch thickens only when the sauce is hot, so stir it in well and let it cook briefly to set the texture.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, vanilla. 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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