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Dessert

White Sauce for Puddings

A simple white sauce made with milk, cornflour, sugar, lemon rind, and salt, used for puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon 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. Blend the cornflour smoothly with a little cold milk.

  2. Put the remainder of the milk into a saucepan and add the lemon rind and a pinch of salt. Simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture over the blended cornflour, stirring continuously. Return the strained mixture to the saucepan.

  4. Sweeten to taste. Simmer gently for 5 minutes.

  5. Use as required.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and, once thickened, gives it a smooth, creamy body.
Cornflour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce its body and smooth texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the mild dairy and lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture over the blended cornflour while stirring continuously. Cornflour must be dispersed in cold liquid before heating, and the hot milk must be added while stirring. Otherwise the starch clumps instead of thickening evenly, leaving lumps in the sauce.

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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