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Dessert

Sweet Pudding Sauce

A sauce made from lemon rind, sugar, water, butter, flour, and sherry or Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sweet Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the lemon rind, sugar, and water together for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon peel.

  3. Mix the butter and flour until smooth, then stir into the sauce and boil for 1 minute.

  4. Add the sherry or Madeira (or brandy) and heat until hot.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its body as it dissolves into the syrup.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked into the liquid, giving it a smooth body.
Sherry or madeira
Adds depth and a wine-based aroma; brandy can be used instead.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the sauce. Flour lumps form if it is added raw to hot liquid. Mixing it smoothly with butter first, then boiling briefly, lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce without graininess.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour, sherry, nutmeg, orange):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, sherry, nutmeg, orange. 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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