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Dessert

Sweet Pudding Sauce

A lemon, sugar, butter, flour, and sherry sauce for sweet pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  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 the mixture into the sauce and boil for 1 minute.

  4. Add the sherry or Madeira (or the wine and brandy mixture) and serve 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the back of a spoon.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the acidity of the lemon and wine.
Sherry or madeira
Adds depth and aroma as the main flavouring liquid.

The step that matters

Mix the butter and flour until smooth before stirring it in. Lumps of flour will not dissolve evenly into hot liquid. Blending butter and flour into a smooth paste first lets the starch disperse and thicken the sauce without clumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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