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Dessert

Sweet Liquid Sauce

A sweet sauce made with flour, water, butter, sugar, syrup, and nutmeg, finished with lemon or almond essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet Liquid Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with cold water until smooth.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt, butter, sugar, and syrup to the mixture.

  3. Stir in enough hot water to make a pint of sauce and bring to a boil.

  4. Grate in a little nutmeg before serving.

Make the pudding sauce

  1. For the pudding sauce, beat the butter and sugar until light.

  2. Flavor with essence of lemon or bitter almonds.

  3. Fifteen minutes before serving, place the bowl in a pan of hot water and stir until hot.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + maple syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, lightly body-filled sauce when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its body and flavor.
Maple syrup
Adds sweetness and a rounded, caramel-like flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into cold water until smooth. Flour lumps form if it meets hot liquid before its starch is evenly dispersed. Starting with cold water lets the particles separate, so the sauce thickens smoothly once heated.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, maple syrup, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, maple syrup, nutmeg. 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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