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Hot Coffee Sauce for Ice Cream

A thick coffee-based sauce made by boiling sugar, cream, salt, and strong black coffee.

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 ↓

Hot Coffee Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar and cream in a saucepan for 5 minutes with a speck of salt.

  2. Add strong black coffee and boil for 10 minutes, or until it thickens into a syrup.

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. Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as it concentrates, the syrupy body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture and softens the sharpness of the coffee.
Strong black coffee
Supplies the main coffee flavour and a slight bitterness that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stopping at the syrupy stage. As water evaporates, the sugar concentration rises and the sauce thickens further as it cools. Boiling too long can make it overly stiff or scorch, so pull it off the heat when it first becomes syrupy.

“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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