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Dessert

Hard Sauce with Cream

A sweet sauce made from sugar, butter, milk, suet, raisins, molasses, spices, bread crumbs, eggs, lemon, gelatin, tapioca, pineapple, and whipped cream, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 27 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Hard Sauce with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir sugar and butter until creamy.

  2. Add remaining ingredients and mix well.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to add richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Eggs
Add structure and richness when set or whipped into the mixture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps the butter cream into a smooth base.
Whipped cream
Adds lightness and a creamy, airy texture to the finished sauce.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg. 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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