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Sauce

Maple Sugar Sauce

A sauce made from sugar, water, butter, and flour, served warm with boiled puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Maple Sugar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the sugar in the water over low heat.

  2. Remove any scum that forms on the surface.

  3. Mix the butter with the flour until smooth, then add to the mixture.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with boiled 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a sweet syrup that forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid and gives the sauce body.

The step that matters

Mix the butter with the flour until smooth before adding. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid unless it is first blended into fat. Working it smooth beforehand lets it disperse evenly and thicken the sauce without lumps.

“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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