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Sauce

Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with egg yolk, flour, water, butter, sugar, and flavored with lemon or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Pudding Sauce

Why it works: Walnut and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk, flour, and cold water.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir well.

  3. Add the piece of butter and sugar, then flavor with lemon juice or nutmeg.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg white until stiff and fold it into the mixture just before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce and adds richness as it cooks in the hot liquid.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling in the liquid to give body.
Egg white
Beaten until stiff, it adds lightness and an airy texture to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the butter and any lemon juice.
Butter
Adds fat for smoothness and a rounder, richer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir well. The egg yolk and flour must be stirred quickly into the hot liquid so the starch and egg proteins thicken evenly without lumps or scrambling.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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