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Dessert

Spreading Sauce for Pudding

A creamy sauce made from sugar, butter, egg whites, and fruit jam, flavored with lemon or vanilla, served over puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and strawberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,149 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Spreading Sauce for Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a bowl, beat together the sugar and butter until creamy.

  2. Flavor with lemon extract, vanilla extract, or grated nutmeg, and add the juice of 1 lemon if desired.

Finish and serve

  1. In another bowl, beat the egg whites to a froth.

  2. Stir in the jam or preserved fruits and mix well.

  3. Serve the sauce over puddings, creams, or blancmange.

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 + strawberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + strawberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

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

  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. Sugar + buttertop 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and, beaten with butter, helps create a smooth, creamy base.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture when beaten with the sugar.
Egg whites
Beaten to a froth, they trap air and lighten the sauce's texture.
Jam or preserved fruits
Adds sweetness, fruit flavor, and moisture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a froth. Egg white proteins unfold and trap air when whipped, creating a foam that lightens the sauce. Under-beating leaves the sauce dense, while over-beating makes the foam dry and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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