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Dessert

Coffee Sauce

A sauce made from coffee, flour, sugar, and thick cream, served cold over vanilla ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the sugar and flour together.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling coffee.

  3. Cook for five minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cream and serve cold over vanilla ice cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Strong coffee
Forms the liquid base and provides the main flavor of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the coffee.
Thick cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the texture and mellowing the coffee flavor.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the boiling coffee. Flour clumps easily when it meets hot liquid. Blending it with sugar first separates the particles, and stirring while adding it keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming 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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