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Sweet Liquid Sauce

A sweet sauce made with flour, butter, sugar, maple syrup, and hot water, finished with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Liquid Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the flour with cold water until smooth.

  2. Add salt, butter, sugar, and syrup to the mixture, then stir in hot water to make 1 pint of sauce.

  3. Boil the mixture, then grate in a little nutmeg.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its rich, syrupy character.
Maple syrup
Adds sweetness and a distinct syrupy flavor that defines the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer mouthfeel and a rounder, more savory-sweet flavor.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with cold water until smooth. Flour lumps form if it meets hot liquid directly. Blending it into cold water first disperses the starch evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when heated.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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