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Dessert

Coffee Sauce

A sauce made from coffee, milk, egg yolks, sugar, and cream, served with pudding or pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 coffee infusion

  1. Grind the coffee and add it to the boiling milk.

  2. Cover the saucepan and let it boil for 2 minutes, then let it stand for 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  2. Strain the coffee through a cloth into the egg mixture.

  3. Add the cream and beat well.

  4. Place over the fire and stir hard for 5 minutes without letting it boil.

Serve

  1. Strain if necessary and serve immediately with a hot pudding or French pancakes.

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. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  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. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat and give it a smooth, rich body.
Cream
Adds fat for a silky texture and a mellow, rounded mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the bitterness of the coffee.
Fresh roasted coffee
Provides the coffee flavour and aroma that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir over the fire without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heating, but if the sauce boils they can scramble and curdle, leaving it grainy and thin. Keep the heat low and stir constantly.

“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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