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Dessert

Coffee Sauce

A sweet coffee-based sauce served cold over vanilla ice cream.

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 ↓

Coffee Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the sugar and flour together.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling coffee.

  3. Cook for five minutes.

  4. Add the cream.

Serve

  1. Serve cold over vanilla ice cream.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  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. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Strong coffee
Provides the main liquid and the bold coffee flavour of the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, and helps separate the flour so it disperses.
Flour
Thickens the coffee as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Thick cream
Adds richness, fat and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and sugar into the boiling coffee. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid. Mixing it with sugar first separates the particles, and stirring while pouring keeps the sauce smooth rather than lumpy.

“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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