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Sauce

Elegant Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with sugar, butter, flour, egg white, boiling water, and lemon or rose essence, garnished with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Elegant Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In an earthenware dish, cream together the sugar, butter, and flour.

  2. Whip the egg white to stiff peaks and fold it into the mixture.

  3. Quickly stir in the boiling water until well combined.

Finish and serve

  1. Transfer to a sauce tureen and add essence of lemon or rose.

  2. Garnish with grated nutmeg if desired.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Fine white sugar
Adds sweetness and helps cream the butter into a smooth base.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it combines with the hot water.
Egg white
Whipped to stiff peaks, it adds lightness and airiness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Quickly stir in the boiling water. Hot water must be added quickly and mixed in well so the flour starches swell evenly and the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps. Delay lets the mixture cool and thicken unevenly.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour, egg, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, egg, lemon. 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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