Skip to main content
Sauce

Hard Sauce

A sweet butter and powdered sugar sauce flavored with nutmeg and optionally sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,645 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Hard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the butter until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar and beat until very light.

  3. Pile the mixture on a dish and grate nutmeg over the top.

  4. If desired, substitute Sherry wine for nutmeg.

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. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,246 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. 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
Provides fat and richness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a light, smooth texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the sauce and dissolves smoothly into the butter, giving it a fine, soft body.

The step that matters

Beat the butter and sugar until very light. Creaming softened butter with sugar incorporates air and dissolves the sugar finely, so the sauce turns smooth and fluffy rather than dense or grainy.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, sherry, wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, sherry, wine. 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.

More hard sauce recipes

for Puddings 9for Hot Puddings 5 See all 143 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes