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Dessert

Hard Sauce

Hard Sauce is a hard candy made from sugar, butter, egg whites, citrus juices, and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

  2. Add the beaten egg whites and the juice of your choice.

  3. Mix all ingredients together for a few minutes.

Chill

  1. Place the mixture in the refrigerator to harden.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, beaten with butter, gives it a light, creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creams with sugar to trap air for a light texture.
Egg whites
Beaten in, they add airy structure that helps the sauce become light and fluffy.
Orange juice
Adds bright citrus flavour and a little acidity to balance the sweetness.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, orange, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, orange, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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