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Arrowroot Sauce for Puddings

A thickening sauce made from arrowroot, sugar, lemon juice, nutmeg, and water for puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Sauce for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the arrowroot smoothly with the water.

  2. Pour the mixture into a saucepan.

  3. Add the sugar, strained lemon juice, and grated nutmeg.

  4. Stir over heat until it boils.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving a smooth, glossy sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's tartness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and a bright, fresh flavour.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until it boils. Arrowroot starch granules swell and thicken as they heat. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed so it does not form lumps. Once thickened, the sauce should not be boiled for long, because prolonged heating can thin the starch again.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, 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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