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Preserve

White Sauce for Puddings

A lemon-flavored white sauce made with milk, cornflour, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White Sauce for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the lemon rind in the water.

  2. Mix the cornflour with milk to a smooth paste.

  3. Pour the boiling water onto the cornflour mixture.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan.

  5. Add the sugar.

  6. Let it boil.

  7. Add the juice of the lemon.

  8. Serve.

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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Cornflour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma to balance the sweetness of the sauce.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Mix the cornflour with milk to a smooth paste. Cornflour clumps easily if it meets hot liquid while dry or unevenly mixed. A smooth paste of cornflour and cold milk disperses the starch so it thickens evenly once the boiling water is added.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. 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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