Name: Strawberry Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup butter; 2 cups powdered sugar; 1 pint mashed strawberries

Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Strawberry Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1 pint mashed strawberries

Directions

Beat the butter and powdered sugar together until creamy.
Add the mashed strawberries and mix well.
Serve with cottage pudding.

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.

Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Fat that makes the sauce rich and creamy, giving it a smooth body.
Powdered sugar: Sweetness that dissolves easily and helps the butter whip into a smooth, creamy base.
Strawberries: Fruit that adds flavor, sweetness and moisture, loosening the creamed mixture into a sauce.

“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.