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Dessert

Brown Pudding Sauce

A sauce made by browning butter, sugar, and flour, then adding hot water until thickened.

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 ↓

Brown Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, mix together the butter, sugar, and flour.

  2. Set the pan on the stove and melt the mixture until it browns.

  3. Once browned, pour in 1 pint of hot water.

  4. Boil and stir until all lumps are melted and the sauce thickens to the consistency of cream.

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

Butter
Adds richness and helps the sugar and flour brown smoothly in the pan.
Sugar
Browns in the hot pan to create the sauce's caramel colour and sweet, toasty flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the hot water, giving it a creamy body.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar and flour mixture. If the mixture is browned too quickly or too far it can taste burnt and bitter. Stirring and watching it closely lets the sugar caramelise evenly before the water is added.

“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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