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Dessert

Ratafia Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with lemon, brandy or sherry, arrowroot, sugar, water, and ginger, served over puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot 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 ↓

Ratafia Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Moisten the arrowroot with cold water.

  2. Combine all ingredients except brandy or wine in a saucepan.

  3. Stir until it boils.

  4. Add brandy or wine.

  5. Pass through a strainer and serve around 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 + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 sauce into a smooth, glossy liquid as it heats.
Brandy or sherry
Adds aroma and a warm, sharp flavour that lifts the sweetness.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma from the rind and juice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the lemon and wine.

The step that matters

Stir until it boils. Arrowroot only thickens fully once it reaches a boil, so stop too early and the sauce stays thin. Keep stirring so the starch does not settle and clump on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, brandy, arrowroot, 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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