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Dessert

Duchesse Pudding Sauce

A creamy sauce made from sugar, cornstarch, water, cream, and salt, used for Duchess pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Duchesse Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the cold water and heat until hot.

  2. Stir in the cornstarch mixed with a little water, then add the salt.

  3. Stir until clear, then remove from heat.

Add the cream

  1. Whip the cream and add it to the sauce once it has cooled, whipping for two to three minutes.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

  3. Cream + corntop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds richness and, when whipped, a light airy texture to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce.
Cornstarch (in the method)
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated.

The step that matters

Add the whipped cream only after the sauce has cooled. Whipped cream is a foam held up by trapped air and fat. A warm sauce would melt the fat and collapse the foam, so the cream would thin and lose its volume.

“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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