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Sauce

Plain Cold, Hard Sauce

A cold, hard sauce made from sugar, butter, flavoring, optional fruit, and optional egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Plain Cold, Hard Sauce

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Plain Cold, Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir together the sugar and butter until creamy and light.

  2. Add flavoring to taste.

  3. For a fruity version, beat in the strawberries or raspberries and the stiffly beaten egg white.

  4. Serve cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, when creamed with butter, helps trap air for a light texture.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and creams with the sugar to give a smooth, spreadable body.
Egg white
When stiffly beaten, adds airy lightness to the sauce.
Strawberries or raspberries
Add fruity flavor, a little acidity, and moisture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir together the sugar and butter until creamy and light. Beating sugar and butter together traps air in the fat, which gives the sauce its light, fluffy texture. If it is underbeaten, the sauce stays dense and grainy.

“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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