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Dessert

Plum or Suet Pudding Sauce

A butter and sugar sauce with eggs, nutmeg, lemon juice, and optional boiling water, served over plum or suet pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 ↓

Plum or Suet Pudding Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and confectioner’s sugar together until well combined.

  2. Beat the eggs separately, whisking the yolks until light and the whites until stiff.

  3. Combine the butter and sugar mixture with the yolks, nutmeg, and lemon juice. Beat hard for 1 minute.

  4. Gently fold in the stiff egg whites.

Serve

  1. Serve over pudding, adding boiling water if desired to soften the sauce.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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
Creams with sugar to give the sauce a rich, smooth body and fat-based mouthfeel.
Eggs
Yolks emulsify and enrich the sauce; whipped whites add lightness and airy texture.
Confectioner’s sugar
Sweetens the sauce and dissolves smoothly into the creamed butter.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiff whites hold air that gives the sauce its lightness. Stirring them in vigorously deflates the foam, so fold gently with a spatula until just combined.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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