Combining hot melted sugar with cold liquid ingredients So I was making a corn-syrup-free pecan pie, and it called for a procedure that I've never seen before. To combine the liquids (milk, eggs, vanilla) with the solids (dark brown sugar, butter, flour) it called for combining the solids over medium heat, cooking it until the sugar was completely melted, and then combining with the liquids.

Now, my candy experience starts and stops at "things containing chocolate", but I can melt sugar. However with the addition of butter and flour I was worried about it burning, and I didn't render it all the way down to full on molten sugar. It was quite melted but it poured more like a thin batter than like liquid sugar.

Combined the liquid(y) sugar with the liquids, and exactly what I thought would happen, happened: the sugar immediately solidified into chunks, and wouldn't incorporate. Rescued it by heating the whole thing, and stirring until it incorporated. This worked, but I think it sent the texture off a bit.

My question is: is this even feasible? Can you really melt sugar to a thin liquid, and then seamlessly incorporate it with a cold liquid? And wouldn't the addition of flour cause issues with cooking the sugar? I pretty much expected it not to work, so it may just have been a failure of will on my part.
That sounds . . . strange. It would make more sense to heat the milk and sugar together first, thicken with the butter and flour, then add the eggs (tempering them with some of the hot mixture first).

Alternately, you could just mix everything together cold (except for the butter, which would need to be melted). I don't really understand the necessity of pre-cooking some of the ingredients, unless this is supposed to be a "no-bake" pie or something. Enzymes in the eggs will digest the flour unless the mix is brought to a boil first, but I doubt there's enough flour in a pecan pie recipe to really matter (it would take a few days for anything to happen, and I've never seen a pecan pie last that long).