Skip to main content
Drink

Pudding Sauce

A thickened sauce made with cornstarch, boiling water, butter, sugar, lemon peel, and sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Pudding Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix cornstarch with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Stir quickly into boiling water and boil for three minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Add butter, sugar, and lemon peel.

  4. Let stand at the back of the stove until ready to use.

Finish and serve

  1. Add wine 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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it boils and starches gelatinize.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the lemon and sherry.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and a mellow, slightly acidic flavor when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stir the cornstarch in quickly and keep stirring while it boils. Cornstarch clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly, leaving lumps. Constant stirring during the boil keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, sherry, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, sherry, wine. 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.

More pudding sauce recipes

Plum 71German 18Plain 16Sweet 16Cabinet 10Cottage 10 See all 364 →

You might also like

Lemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes