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Dessert

Sweet Pudding Sauce

A sauce made from lemon rind, sugar, water, butter, flour, and sherry or brandy, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Sweet Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the lemon rind, sugar, and water together for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon peel and mix the butter with the flour until smooth.

  3. Stir the butter mixture into the sauce and boil for 1 minute.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the sherry or Madeira (or brandy) and heat until hot, but do not boil.

  2. Serve the sauce warm.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Sherry or madeira
Adds aroma and a rich, fortified wine flavour.

The step that matters

Add the wine without boiling. Alcohol and its aromatic compounds evaporate quickly at boiling temperature, so heating the sauce only until hot keeps more of the flavour and aroma of the sherry, Madeira, or brandy.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, butter, flour, sherry):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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