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Common Pudding Sauce

A buttery sauce sweetened with sugar and wine, optionally flavored with lemon zest or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,083 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Common Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, sweeten ½ cup of melted butter with ⅔ cup of sugar.

  2. Gradually add ⅔ cup of white wine while stirring.

  3. Heat the mixture until it is just about to boil.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, adding lemon zest or nutmeg if desired.

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 + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and helps balance the wine's sharpness.
White wine
Adds acidity and bright, fruity aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the white wine while stirring. Adding the wine slowly while stirring helps the liquid blend evenly with the butter and sugar, so the sauce stays smooth instead of separating into layers.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, white wine. 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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Plum 71German 18Plain 16Sweet 16Cabinet 10Cottage 10 See all 364 →

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