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Clear Sauce for Puddings

A clear sauce made with arrowroot, sugar, water, and optional flavorings for puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Clear Sauce for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, mix the arrowroot, sugar, and water until well combined.

  2. Stir briskly over medium heat until the mixture boils.

  3. Remove from heat and add your choice of flavouring.

  4. If desired, add a little cochineal to color the sauce pink.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Arrowroot
Thickens the water into a clear, glossy sauce as it heats and boils.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the flavouring.

The step that matters

Stir briskly until the mixture boils. Arrowroot thickens once it reaches a boil, and stirring keeps it dispersed so it does not clump or settle on the pan bottom. Stopping before a full boil leaves the sauce thin, while stirring too little can cause lumps.

“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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