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Sauce

Plain Pudding-sauce

A simple sauce made by thickening boiling water with wheat flour and sweetening with sugar, butter, nutmeg, and lemon or vanilla essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Plain Pudding-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, bring 3 pints of water to a boil.

  2. In a small bowl, mix 3 tablespoons of wheat flour with a little cold water until smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling water to thicken.

  4. Stir in 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 tablespoon of butter.

  5. Flavor with nutmeg and either lemon or vanilla essence to taste.

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. Wheat + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together359 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Wheat flour
Thickens the boiling water into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with cold water before adding it. Flour dropped into hot liquid clumps as its outer layer sets before the inside hydrates. Mixing it smooth with cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour, sugar, butter, 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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