Name: Maple-sugar Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pound maple sugar; ½ cup cold water; 2 tablespoons butter

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

½ pound maple sugar
½ cup cold water
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

Prepare

Break the maple sugar into small bits.
Put the sugar into a thick saucepan with the cold water.

Make the sauce

Heat the saucepan over the fire and melt the sugar until it forms a clear syrup.
Remove from the fire and stir in the butter cut into small bits.
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.

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 the maple flavor that defines the sauce.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, glossy body to the finished 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.