Skip to main content
Sauce

Mother's Pudding Sauce

A sweet sauce made with sugar, flour, vinegar, butter, nutmeg, and water, boiled for fifteen minutes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mother's Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine sugar, flour, vinegar, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add water and nutmeg, then stir well.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and helps thicken the sauce as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, pourable sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Stirring while the sauce boils. Flour can clump and scorch on the bottom of the pan if it is not stirred while the liquid heats and thickens. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce cooks evenly and turns smooth.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Capersfits about as well

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

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes