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Dessert

Common Pudding Sauce

A buttery, sweet sauce thickened with wine and egg yolks, served over pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Common Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Sweeten the melted butter with sugar.

  2. Gradually add the wine while stirring until it reaches the point of thickening.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks.

  4. Stir the hot wine mixture into the egg yolks.

  5. Heat the mixture gently until thickened and frothy.

Serve

  1. Pour over pudding and serve immediately.

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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce on gentle heat and add richness and a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma, balancing the sweetness of the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the butter and balances the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture gently until thickened and frothy. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but too much heat scrambles them into lumps. Low, steady heat and constant stirring keep the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

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