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Sago Sauce for Sweet Puddings

A sweet sauce made from sago, lemon, and wine, served with boiled puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sago Sauce for Sweet Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sago in two or three waters.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sago, water, and lemon peel.

  2. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, then remove the lemon peel.

  3. Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil.

  4. Strain the lemon juice before adding it to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve as a delicious accompaniment to various boiled puddings.

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 + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sherry + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Sago
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and softens during simmering.
Port or sherry
Adds depth and a fortified wine sweetness and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon
Provides acidity and aromatic citrus flavour from the rind and juice.

The step that matters

Simmer the sago gently. Sago must be cooked long enough for its starch granules to swell and turn translucent, which thickens the sauce. Boiling hard or stopping early can leave it cloudy, lumpy, or stiff.

“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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