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Puddings and Ice Cream Sauces

A simple sauce made from flour, sugar, butter, and flavoring, boiled and stirred until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 ↓

Puddings and Ice Cream Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Slowly pour the boiling water into the mixture, stirring continuously.

  3. Let it boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the creamed butter and your chosen flavoring.

Flavor and serve

  1. For lemon sauce, use 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and a little grated lemon rind.

  2. For a richer flavor, add a little nutmeg with any flavoring.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Adds sweetness and body to the sauce as it dissolves into the boiling water.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the boiling water, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling water in slowly while stirring. Adding hot liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so it hydrates evenly and the sauce cooks smooth instead of forming lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, nutmeg, vanilla, sherry, brandy. 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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