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Sauce

Liquid Pudding Sauce

A simple sauce made from sugar, butter, flour, flavoring, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Liquid Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, butter, flour, and flavoring extract.

  2. Pour in just enough boiling water to thicken slightly, stirring while pouring.

  3. Optionally, use an egg instead of flour.

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. Sugar + buttertop 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
Provides sweetness and body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in liquid.
Flavoring extract
Adds aroma and flavor to the sauce.
Boiling water
Dissolves the sugar and heats the flour starch so the sauce thickens.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water. Too much water will leave the sauce thin, and pouring while stirring keeps the flour from clumping as its starch swells. Stop once the sauce has only slightly thickened, since it thickens more as it cools.

“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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